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Comment by aduffy | Hacker News Reader

The conditions that created OpenAI (oodles of money from some of the wealthiest people on the planet) are not reproducible for the vast majority of businesses.

If you have oodles of money from the wealthiest people on the planet to spend on the worlds best researchers, you too can ignore this rule.

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Didn't work out too well for the Metaverse.

What people from the "worlds best researchers" section of researchers ended up/are currently working on Facebook's Metaverse?

I mean literally off the top of my head, John Carmack? Doesn't really get much better than that in terms of practical on-hands VR research and development.

You can check for yourself though: https://research.facebook.com/people/research-area/augmented...

That list is general VR/VR which includes any work on Oculus and more, not specifically Metaverse.

Going through that list regardless, I don't find Carmac there, and searching about it, seems he quit ~5 months ago. Might want to dig up a better example :)

...he quit because the product was a failure. Which was my point. But sure, here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash

And if you don't think one of the richest companies in the world can afford to hire whoever they want, then you're just being intentionally obtuse.

Thanks :)

It's not that I believe they couldn't afford worlds best researchers, mostly questioning that the worlds best researchers would want to work at Facebook, no matter what the pay is.

he ragequit

He saw the writing on the wall.

He wrote it. Of course he sees it.

Also true

He realized the noclip cheat didn't work in the Metaverse.

It's too early to say it hasn't worked out. Apple is planned to reveal their headset this year. If thats the case, VR/AR may become the norm the same way Smart Phones and Smart Watches are.

If you don't think Meta will release Horizon on Apple's headset, then you havn't been watching.

I wouldn't put smartwatches and smartphones in the same category. I have a smartwatch but my day-to-day life wouldn't change in a material way if I didn't.

Obviously it didn't work out for meta. That isn't even up for debate.

Meta has admitted to pivoting to AI and cutting down their metaverse teams significantly.

Besides, even if Apple succeed. Meta will still be stuck in the exact same situation - under Apple's boots again, which it so desperately tried to escape from by going hardware heavy in VR in the first place.

I don’t see that Zuckerberg avatar, or whatever Apple equivalent of that, pans out in coming 5 years… who does? Who bothers to visually stimulate themselves with recreated face of a living person in VR?

They can release it as cranial implant for all that matters, doesn't mean it's going to be a success.

Did we ever find out how soon that bet was supposed to pay off? I'm sure there were people talking about OpenAI's decision to double down on LLMs as a failure before ChatGPT came out.

What are you talking about? $META's strategy that has only been in play for 18 months?

Or are you talking about the grifter-laden crypto/NFT-adjacent "metaverses"?

Or are you talking about the ridiculously successful Second Life, Roblox, or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft?

Technically they've been building on the Metaverse idea since 2014 when they acquired Oculus. 8 years later and people still do not care about VR.

I'd agree that VR has yet to be proven for any serious adoption, but I don't think the "metaverse" as a concept is contingent upon VR at all. Companies have tried pushing VR headsets for 35 years and none of them have yet to succeed.

Despite that, video games and persistent virtual worlds have thrived.

Well the Metaverse as a standalone product then is even more of a failure by every reasonable metric. Could it pop off tomorrow? Sure. Is it? Probably not.

People expressed similar skepticism about the world wide web in the mid 90’s, despite proving utility and entertainment value (unlike cryptocurrencies).

Metaverse hasn't proven utility or entertainment though?

Your narrow definition of metaverse is making it very difficult for you navigate this conversation.

Metaverse isn't solely defined by Facebook's "Horizon Worlds".

Your definition of a successful product is making it very difficult for to you navigate this conversation. At no point has Facebook provided demonstrable success in regards to what we know as "The Metaverse". Frankly I don't even know what your argument is.

"The metaverse is a virtual reality (VR) space that enables users to interact with each other inside a computer-generated environment."

Maybe you're unaware of what the Metaverse is, and you're projecting some imagined reality 5-10 years down the road where the "Metaverse" is just web6 or web8 in terms of VR/AR integration with the internet as a whole. In that sense, yes, everyone with a foot in the game will have adopted to whatever that future looks like, but the Metaverse as we know it today will still not have been a success.

I think Microsoft is even ahead of Facebook in terms of a "Metaverse" style UI integration 10+ years ago.

People had been building AI for decades, with nothing to show for. Until one day they did.

Magic Leap

Also if you have oodles of money then creating a problem for everyone instead of solving a problem for everyone appears to be a viable strategy.

Oodles of money helps but is neither necessary nor sufficient. What matters here is having a product that’s captivating and revolutionary.

Exactly. This is shown by metaverse. Tons of money thrown at a product that never had a defined market fit.

You cannot just throw reams of cash at something and expect it to be a hit.

They literally had 10+ millions to spend on research with no prototype and only a vague idea of how to produce a profitable product by saying they will create an AGI and "ask it how to make money." for several years

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