Zuckerberg shifts focus to AI, doesn’t give up on the metaverse

While AI may have stolen the spotlight from the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg has reaffirmed his trust in the virtual world.

Even Zuckerberg, having put all his bets on the metaverse taking off, can’t deny the obvious – AI has taken over nearly every aspect of our lives.

“I am bringing matters to AI research efforts closer together to support our long-term goals of building general intelligence, open sourcing it responsibly, and making it available and useful to everyone in all of our daily lives,” he said in a recent post on Threads.

Meta, having rebranded just before the sudden boom of AI to emphasize the owner's trust in the virtual world, is also working on building what Zuckerberg called “an absolutely massive amount of infrastructure to support” the development of general intelligence.

“By the end of this year, we're going to have around 350,000 Nvidia A100s, or around 600,000 H100 equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs,” he said.

The company is also currently training Llama 3 and has “an exciting roadmap of future models that we're going to keep training responsibly and safely.”

While the company is going to focus on AI, Zuckerberg continues to demonstrate his support for the metaverse.

“People are also going to need new devices for AI, and this brings together AI and the metaverse because, over time, I think a lot of us are going to talk to AI as frequently throughout the day. And I think a lot of us are going to do that using glasses because glasses are the ideal form factor for letting an AI see what you see and hear what you hear,” Zuckerberg said.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which gathered for its 54th Annual Meeting in Davos this week, the metaverse market is expected to be worth between $6-13 trillion by 2030.

The metaverse, despite setbacks and disappointment about things like legless avatars or heavy VR goggles, is growing and covering ever wider areas. Its global revenues are expected to reach $800 billion in 2024. That’s comparable to the GDP of countries like Poland, Taiwan, or Switzerland.