Meta, the hardware company

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Today we are covering…

💾 Meta, the hardware company

📜 An update on AI regulation

🧑‍🎨 Digital fashion design is now being taught at the #1 design school

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Meta, the hardware company

Back in late 2021, the artist formerly known as Facebook bolded, underlined, and italicized its ambitions to prioritize an investment in immersive technologies and the metaverse when it formally changed its name to Meta.

Over the last 18 months that decision has appeared to backfire. Reddit co-founder and sneaky-tall-in-person-human Alexis Ohanian gave great insight as to why.

TLDR;

Meta’s version of the metaverse is lazy and doesn’t “10X” anything already out there. We have been living in the metaverse for years because the metaverse is forming digital communities to consume and experience digital content aka playing Roblox and scrolling Instagram counts.

Recently, Meta decided to dial back its metaverse schtick and laid off 11,000 employees including its metaverse team (the first time since its founding the company announced mass layoffs).

They went too big too quickly investing in a vision with a long-term payoff while a macroeconomic downturn and increased competition caused a slide in ad revenue.

And, par for the course, they launched a new large language model called LLaMA and are working on integrating AI into current offerings as well as breaking out their version of ChatGPT.

- ICYDK Meta has already been using AI/ML for a long long time. It's been a mainstay in its newsfeed just to name one of many examples.

Now the company is attempting to tie it all together with a hardware play. Something they are sometimes good at (Oculus vs. Portal)

Meta is refocusing on AI and metaverse infrastructure announcing a new AI chip, data center, and supercomputer.

Why this matters

Regardless of its success at the moment, you need to have high conviction in something in order to sink 36B and change your name due to it. So Meta is in fact still a metaverse company.

Yet, like any good big tech company they were obviously going to invest pretty heavily into generative AI. So they are also now an AI company…

Now a company as big and well capitalized as Meta is one of the few companies that can ostensibly be both. But for optics and earnings calls and press, etc. If you’re both you’re neither.

So this is really good for Meta and makes a lot of sense because the metaverse and AI will require overlapping investments in infrastructure plus AI will be super prevalent in the metaverse.

Ergo this can help steady the ship of a confused and battered Meta and allow them to legitimately work on both the metaverse and AI at the same time but in a smarter way.

An update on AI regulation

It's a bit scary when a new pervasive technology comes out and then “The Godfather” of said technology quits because of its dangers.

And then one of the industry’s biggest startups’ CEO says it's getting “crazier and crazier” and “poses an existential threat to humanity.”

And then one of the people in charge of the ethics behind AI at Google is reportedly fired for authoring a paper warning about some of its risks.

So what is the overarching thread tying this all together?

A call for AI regulation.

So here is a brief update on the state of AI regulation.

Right now there is very little real regulation. And that makes sense because technology moves way faster than Washington (just ask crypto), and ChatGPT is not even 6 months old.

What there is is a bunch of suggestions: some valid, some not.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is calling for AI licenses while Elon Musk and 1000 other “influential people” are urging an immediate pause of GPT-4 development.

One member of Congress, Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, said AI regulation “doesn't feel urgent for members [of Congress].”

So we are really in the “build now, as for forgiveness later” phase of AI regulation.

Digital fashion design is now being taught at the #1 design school

This story was featured in Metaproof Fashion, our weekly newsletter exploring how emerging technologies like AI, web3, and VR are disrupting the fashion industry.

One of the world’s top design schools, The New School’s Parsons School of Design, is launching a course on digital fashion design. The Parson’s student community sold 1.8B digital fashion items on Roblox in 2022.

By the numbers:

• 75% of Gen Z consumers have spent money on digital fashion.

• 70% of Gen Z consumers say their avatar fashion on Roblox influences their IRL fashion choices

This story was featured in Metaproof Fashion, our weekly newsletter exploring how emerging technologies like AI, web3, and VR are disrupting the fashion industry.

Digital Fashion is exploding. Stay on top of it all and subscribe to Metaverse Fashion.

Quick Hits

• Meta pursues AR partnership with Magic Leap. (Link)

• The downfall of Pokemon Go creator Niantic. (Link)

• AI deep learning decodes hand gestures from brain images. (Link)

• Man writes 100 books using ChatGPT and Claude, earns roughly $2K. (Link)

• Samsung nixes Bing and sticks with Google as default search engine in its new phones. (Link)

• Baidu’s metaverse head resigns amid profit struggles. (Link)

• Space launch operations at Cape Canaveral, the nation’s busiest spaceport, get recently replicated in a digital 3D metaverse to predict congestion. (Link)

• Want to see what your sports car looks like in red instead of yellow? Auto makers like BMW use AR to accelerate the development and prototyping of new products. (Link)

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All content on this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not aim to serve as or replace expert investment advice.

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