From "Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company 'Meta'" (Futurism).
Here's my reaction to Meta when it began in 2021: "Eh. I'm not making a new tag for this."
December 6, 2025
"All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion... as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in."
"Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company’s executives are eying gigantic budget cuts, as high as 30 percent, for the teams responsible for its Meta Horizon Worlds product and Quest VR headset — another nail in the coffin for Zuckerberg’s obsession that has been a major thorn in the sides of investors for years now.... Besides, Meta and Zuckerberg have now found their next obsession: artificial intelligence. The company has committed to spending an astronomical $72 billion on AI this year — roughly as much as the company’s lost on the metaverse, coincidentally...."
From "Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company 'Meta'" (Futurism).
From "Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company 'Meta'" (Futurism).
Posts
43 comments:
People need to stop using Facebook.
"Eh. I'm not making a new tag for this."
Made me laugh.
Zuckerberg thinks he's a genius, but IMO he just lucked out with Facebook. He should stop trying for the next big thing.
You can get pretty damned far with one or two good ideas early on. That's what I did, but I didn't make the mistake of thinking that made me a genius. I mean I am one, but that's not how I know.
Zuckerburg is right about where we are going.
His failure was hiring the DEI crowd to implement it.
Schumpeterian "creative destruction."
How a 24-year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout lured some of Meta's brightest minds to join her AI math startup
Axiom Math is the brainchild of Carina Hong, a Rhodes Scholar who dropped out of her graduate studies at Stanford to found the company in March.
Axiom, which recently said it solved two Erdos math problems that eluded mathematicians for decades, announced a $64 million seed round in September.
The company has 17 employees, many of whom hail from Meta's Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab, as well as Meta's GenAI team and Google Brain, which merged into DeepMind in 2023.
Axiom is tackling advanced math, which AI researchers and leaders consider essential to achieving superintelligence. Hong says this mission helped her draw top talent from Big Tech companies.
"One thing I heard from some of the top researchers and mathematicians I've recruited to Axiom is that solving for mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy," Hong told Business Insider. "When the problem is hard enough, talent density gets very high, and that makes you a magnet for other great thinkers."
Hong told Business Insider that she focused some of her early recruiting efforts on FAIR because "they consistently deliver amazing research work."
FAIR is one of the oldest pillars of Meta's rapidly evolving AI organization, focused on long-term research. Meta conducted layoffs on that team in October and later lost its chief scientist, Yann LeCun, who announced he was leaving Meta in November to start his own AI startup...
Hong says she sees age and experience as "sort of manmade concepts," and has been accustomed to working with more senior researchers during her time in academia. She has also sought to imbue Axiom with a "non-hierarchical" culture.
The company's mission goes beyond math—another draw for recruits. Hong said Axiom's commercial applications could include "any domain where you need provably correct reasoning," such as hardware and software verification, quantitative finance, and cryptography.
If I want to scape from “reality”, I take a nap.
I'm still trying to get a firm grip on reality so virtual reality will just have to wait.
A bonfire of capital from having a strategy weathervane.
Should be a reminder for investors who can't make the AI return on CAPEX arithmetic add up but are backing that these tech visionaries can't be wrong. They can.
I like the idea of your company being named after the pipe dream that turned into one of your biggest failures. Berkshire Hathaway, for example.
The $41 billion that Musk paid to purchase Free Speech for Americans - and thus himself - is starting to seem like a real bargain basement price.
Original Mike said...
"Eh. I'm not making a new tag for this."
Made me laugh.
Me too. In the long run, I think Zuckerberg is right about VR—imagine instead of a video chat with some far away relative, you could have lunch with them in a seaside village in Greece or Italy. You could play the best golf courses in the world without leaving your house on a snowy January morning. You could practice open heart surgery endlessly before trying it on a person.
But if he thought he could force the technology by throwing crazy amounts of money at it, he must be a Democrat.
I consider this as partial proof that Zuckerberg did not come up with the original idea of Facebook.
They’re already running many prime time Meta AI ads. Meta Us Too…
BTW, the company didn't lose any money, only the ephemeral value of the stock. Losing money is negative cash flow.
“The $41 billion that Musk paid to purchase Free Speech”
X is #1 news app in:
UK
Germany
Italy
Spain
Switzerland
Netherlands
Greece
Austria
Poland
Ireland
Hungary
Finland
Romania
EVEN MORE THAN the company’s lost on the metaverse..
fify!
Massive accumulations of capital produce massive gambles. Once everyone starts calling you a visionary, you're expected to have visions.
And then you learn about mirages.
Zuckerberg is facing a meta transition.
Orignal Mike said..
he just lucked out with Facebook. He should stop trying for the next big thing.
His problem is; he stopped stealing other people's good ideas,
and started spending money on his Own BS
Somebody show me up!
Show me a product that was useful, and CAME from IN facebook?
In the early 80s, a good number of us writers, screenwriters, used Kaypro IIs, what Wikipedia now describes as, "a line of rugged, luggable CP/M-based computers." Another screenwriter and I decided we were going to drive down the 405 to Solano Beach and find those guys and invest in the company. We never did. It died twenty minutes into the Nineties. My Kaypro IV is in my closet, worth $375,000. I think. Well, to me.
MikeD said...
BTW, the company didn't lose any money, only the ephemeral value of the stock. Losing money is negative cash flow.
"Losing money" shows up on the P&L as negative cash flow, yes. But you can also "lose money" on the balance sheet through the negative "cash flow" represented by the sunk cost of unproductive investments added to the stock of assets in prior periods that eventually have to be written off, which is what the stock price may be anticipating here.
After what Zuckerdork did during Trump’s 2020 campaign, I hope he fails in every endeavor he embarks on.
"...BTW, the company didn't lose any money, ..."
Really, I wonder.... What was the category performance against budget, then? What was the sunk cost for the outlay? Companies don't advertise their screwups, but there are ways of assessing the disappointment other than social media evaluations.
Only 30%?
"Zuckerburg is right about where we are going."
$72 billion for AI? That's enough to keep the bubble inflated for an extra four to six weeks.
You know, it occurs to me that Zuckerbucks had expected VR to be a much more effective way for pedos to find victims. He thought he was building Roblox. But the avatars were insufficiently lifelike.
Original Mike said...
Zuckerberg thinks he's a genius, but IMO he just lucked out with Facebook. He should stop trying for the next big thing.
Agreed. He stole the original idea from the Winklevoss twins, and lucked into getting Sean Parker for a front man to achieve respectability with respect to Silicon Valley investors (e.g., investor Peter Thiel).
Remember, Facebooks started out as a way for guys to check out chicks. Zuck is a pimp at heart.
Jupiter said...
"Zuckerburg is right about where we are going."
$72 billion for AI? That's enough to keep the bubble inflated for an extra four to six weeks.
What bubble?
It depends on what he built for 72 billion dollars. The biggest problem with most big tech companies is that they are infested with HR and DEI bullshit that don't produce a whole lot of value. They make up for that with H1B visa fuckery.
Zuckerburg is trying to create a disruptive technology. If he built what he was trying to build it would be worth trillions.
You can't really put a value on the current AI generative models. They are going to completely change how society works at a fundamental level.
A bunch of companies will lose value. Others will be the biggest companies in the world.
Hey, remember when Musk was going to go under because he was forced to buy X at an inflated price? I do.
The Zuckerborg needs to be reprogrammed.
"Hey, remember when Musk was going to go under because he was forced to buy X at an inflated price? I do."
And all the talent was going to leave.
"Axiom, which recently said it solved two Erdos math problems that eluded mathematicians for decades...."
Key words: "said it"
I’ll never forgive him for Zuck Bucks.
Reading the article in BI, ( I find their journalism to be deficient) they did not say what the 24 yer old was studying at Stanford. I looked it up and she was in the school of eduction, so I guess she was getting an EdD. But as a Rhodes did some time at Oxford too in the ed dept.
I like the idea of Axiom but the story of a 20 something woman starting a tech company supported by older male elites is a well worn path to weirdness, so I won’t invest. If she was gating a math or comp sci PhD before she dropped out that would be more positive. But you never know, do you. She could be legit.
The problem with virtual reality as it exists today isn't the "VR space" itself -- there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it, from games to socializing, and the software continues to improve (although it sounds as if tech companies are slowing down their efforts in that regard). The real issue is the physical equipment itself -- it's either bulky and awkward to use, way too expensive, or both. I bought the previous iteration of Meta's headset, the Quest 2, and it felt like a brick on my face. Nothing made it comfortable, including an expensive third-party strap. Apparently the new version, the Quest 3, isn't much better in that regard. (Meanwhile, the Apple Vision Pro headset is apparently easier to use but costs upward of $3,500.) Until the equipment is nearly as light and comfortable as a pair of glasses, in addition to being relatively affordable for ordinary customers, the "VR world" will never be the mass-consumption enterprise these companies want it to be.
the luxury of being so wealthy that a financial loss of $70 billion is a mere drop in the proverbial bucket
how much did Zuck spend to get Biden elected?
Photos of Carina Hong look AI generated. Or maybe she really has that uncanny, anime look naturally.
As I understand it she was a math/physics major at MIT who went on to study neuroscience at Oxford and then math and law at Stanford. She's getting money from her native China, so whatever she makes, China will probably have it.
People didn’t give up drugs & alcohol for virtual reality. This was foreseeable.
Until someone finds a way to invent something like The Matrix, virtual worlds aren't going to appeal to many people.
"And all the talent was going to leave."
Most of the ones fired or who left in huff are in the process of trying to unionize Starbucks or are being spit out of the bottom of the porn industry.
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