A new Meta blog post has described how Zuckerberg intends to deliver his “year of efficiency.” 10,000 jobs will be eliminated and an additional 5,000 vacancies will be closed. “Lower priority projects” will also be closed. Is Zuckerberg leaving the Metaverse?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced 10,000 layoffs and a 5,000 job freeze in the company’s “efficiency year.”

This follows a financially difficult 2022, which saw a slowdown in ad revenue and a 13% workforce reduction in November. It was the first time that Facebook or Meta had carried out massive layoffs and reductions.

The drive of the company horizontal worldsa virtual dating service within the Metaverse that is no different from VR chat rooms, was greeted with a shrug. Zuckerberg originally expected 500,000 monthly active users to be on horizontal worlds last Christmas. This target was moved to 280,000 after only 200,000 were reported to be using the service.

Meta posted a loss of $13.7 billion last year, and its Reality Labs division posted $4.28 billion. lost operating costs only in the second trimester.

NFT support on Instagram and Facebook is also being removed after a fruitless year of experimenting with paid cosmetics and assets on both platforms. Stéphane Kasriel, Head of Business and Financial Technology at Meta, has announced that Meta will “instead focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses.”

Some Product Updates: Across the company, we are taking a hard look at our priorities to increase our focus. We’re phasing out NFTs for now to focus on other ways to support creators, individuals, and businesses. 🧵[1/5]

—Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023

So far, the continued negative press from Meta hasn’t deterred Zuckerberg. He publicly insisted that the Metaverse will be HE the future of online socializing, going so far as to call it the ‘The next chapter of the Internet.’

Funding for virtual reality and online social spaces has been large and aggressive.

In August 2022, Meta had grossed a total of $26 billion in financing to more than 17 rounds. The company has spent more than $36 billion on Metaverse specifically since 2019, while profits have been steadily declining. In the third quarter of last year, the the company earned 285 million dollars in revenue, almost half of that same quarter in 2021.

At a shareholder meeting in 2022, Zuckerberg said a “significant amount” of money would be lost over the next three to five years. This bullish approach would have angered major investorswho called Meta’s overspending “deaf.”

Now, with its recent layoffs and promises to streamline operations, it looks like the company is finally starting to rethink its long-term strategy.

Why Zuckerberg could potentially change course

Experts have said that Meta is moving away from its VR plans and turning to machine learning instead.

In February, Zuckerberg announced a new product group which will develop generative AI for the company’s existing platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta will look for ways to generate text, images, and other media comparable to human-created content.

This shift from failed virtual social spaces to artificial intelligence products is not all that surprising and reflects a larger shift within technology. snapchat has ChatGPT integrated into your user interfaceGoogle builds its own chatbot called Bard, and Microsoft’s own Bing chatbot was built using OpenAI language models.

ChatGPT and DALL-E have been at the forefront of consumer tech conversations for the past twelve months or so.

Now anyone can create unique images or text from human input using AI based on a huge database of references. This has given rise to countless memes, disturbing depictions of faces that don’t exist, and debate over the moral ethics of an emerging technology that could have vast ramifications for art.

Unlike Meta wrestling horizontal worldspromising AI programs like these have the numbers to back up their supposed public interest.

open AI surpassed 100 million users in January and is said to be growing faster than most traditional social platforms, including TikTok. In September 2022, DALL-E imaging software had more than 1.5 million users actively creating over 2 million images per day. Meta’s efforts to capture the public’s imagination have paled in comparison, to put it mildly.

AI is becoming a serious disruptor to our creative processes and could be the real “next chapter” of the internet. There’s no question that Zukerberg wants a piece of the pie, even if it means significantly altering Meta’s plans and admitting that the company may have been wrong to invest so much in VR.

Why has the metaverse failed to capture the public’s attention?

Despite Zuckerberg’s great enthusiasm, Metaverse failed to attract consumers early on.

Its clunky reliance on a VR headset, its links to Facebook, and its unimpressive visual design are just a few reasons for its lukewarm reception. While Meta’s user base can be hugely impressive, with over 3 billion daily active accounts, that doesn’t necessarily translate to customer trust.

Only 18% of social network users believe that Facebook protects their privacy, For example. We tend to use Meta apps out of sheer necessity rather than goodwill.