In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of “Meta Platforms,” talked about expanding the online presence of social media users in the virtual world. He said that the goal of the company to boost community building in the virtual world could become achievable in the second half of the decade. He has shown concerns regarding the decline of his daily active users on Metaverse, and this happened for the first time in the last two quarters.
Therefore, he is continuously making efforts to broaden the horizons of Metaverse by enabling people to buy and sell digital goods to avatars who can not only communicate with each other but also make eye contact, which is not possible through video calls. He said, “We hope to get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall.”
It dated back to 2014 when Zuckerberg made an investment of $2 billion into augmented and virtual reality through the headset manufacturing company, Oculus VR. But unfortunately, the response rate towards headsets was not sufficient enough to meet or outnumber the units of PCs or smartphones sold. But today, Zuckerberg expressed his confidence in the operational capabilities of “Meta Quest 2” with a starting price of $299.
According to him, “Quest 2 has been a hit. I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone. It has exceeded my expectations. But I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundred million or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there. So that’s the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are on a somewhat larger scale already today.”
In addition to that, Metaverse is planning to introduce the feature of artificial intelligence (AI) into its daily site recommendations. He said that advertising through AI could become the source of generating 97% of its revenues, just like TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, did to boost the number of its active users by 1 billion per month. The introduction of the “Reels” feature on Instagram by Meta is another step taken by the company in 2020 to increase the online presence of its active users on the platform.
As of now, Meta is seeking the services of AI to make the Reels feature more fascinating to Instagram users. Zuckerberg said, “Our AI system can choose based on what it knows about you and what you are going to be interested in and learn about, and what you want to see. So, as we get better at that, you know, our engineers are shipping improvements to the models every week. We check something and, you know, relevance goes up by a few percent. And then we repeat and do that the next week.”
Zuckerberg further said that he has just bought an “AI Research Supercluster,” which will be the fastest AI supercomputer. The computer is anticipated to be manufactured completely by this year and will help considerably in making our virtual world better. However, the company will cease investing in AI computers if there is a period of recession, said Zuckerberg.