Most companies could never dream of burning $40bn over 3 years developing a new product. But, then again, most companies don't have a business that has churned out $163bn of operating profit to fund that investment.
And, while virtual reality has yet to become actual reality for many Meta-owned platform users, there’s already some fierce competition in the form of Apple's long-awaited Vision Pro VR headset, which hit shelves on Friday having sold an estimated 200k pre-order units at $3,499 apiece.
Bot pursuit
Although Meta is still waiting for its big bet on VR to pay off, the company didn't shy away from pouring resources into AI as the sector exploded last year. Meta launched LLaMA 1, its first iteration of a generative AI large language model, in February 2023, and only a year later it has already begun training LLaMA 3, its latest attempt in building towards artificial general intelligence (AGI).If you want to get a sense of where Zuckerberg & Co’s focus is, earnings calls aren’t a bad place to start. The term “metaverse” came up a total of 20 times in the earnings call from Q2 2021, as the company rebranded to “Meta” to better encompass its virtual world vision. But, recently, “AI” has been getting all the love — with a whopping 72 mentions in Meta’s Friday call.
