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Comment by hackernewds | Hacker News Reader

Facebook can, and still could totally buy Unity. This is something that they've discussed years before the pandemic or metaverse hype.

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1619818349525086208?s=...

From internal emails from Zuck^. Also has a bonus glimpse into their VR/AR strategy

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Excerpt from this 2015 email..

"An innovation brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR/AR is the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and AI is not yet tangible... succeeding in VR/AR has the most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years."

> AI is not yet tangible

Did Meta bet on the wrong horse?

FAIR has been one of the best AI labs in the world, with one of the godfathers of AI leading it. What do you mean by "bet on the wrong horse?"

Not spend $10B/year on AI, not change the name of company from Facebook to 'AIBook', not launch equivalent of ChatGPT instead buy Occulus and then launch MetaQuest.. and similar such bets?

Meta AI employees will privately tell you Google, Open AI and a bunch of others are much more advanced than them. For some reason Google can't capitalize on it and it can't be because "AI is not in their DNA"...

Interesting comment. Curious who you see to be the winning horses, or at least candidates. OpenAI is certainly something special. Not sure who else I'd add to the list. AirBnB has a really strong culture of experimentation and infra for it. Their product is boring though. From your perspective, is it about culture, product, people, something else?

This makes a ton of sense because a lot of Unity's business is in their ad platform, not engine licensing. Horizon Worlds is written in Unity, and it gives them full control over their hardware/software platform.

It would do a lot of harm to Unity's relationship with smaller developers though, to Godot's benefit.

Unity has already done a lot of harm to Unity's reputation.

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