Meta, the world’s seventh most valuable company, says that the hype that once surrounded the metaverse has moved on to artificial intelligence (AI). As such, it appears as though the company — formerly known as Facebook — appears to be pivoting away from its previous focus on individual user experiences towards a more enterprise-oriented approach.
In a recent blog post titled, “Game Changers: 3 Predictions for Technological Transformation in 2024 & Beyond,” Meta lays out its “top three predictions for the shifts we’ll see” as the metaverse evolves.
Metaverse for enterprise
The first prediction, that enterprise and education applications will demonstrate value in the metaverse, may be the strongest signal that Meta’s focus for the Quest headset hardware will be on increasing enterprise adoption.
Meta says that metaverse hype is “dead,” and cites AI as the new belle of the hype-cycle ball. It points out that consumer interest in the sector is up and references the Quest app’s performance on the Apple App Store after the holiday season, but it ultimately touts business use cases such as a computer-assisted-drawing collaboration tool and several enterprise tools as evidence of the metverse’s trajectory in 2024 and beyond.
Portable artificial intelligence
On board large language models (LLMs) take up the second spot in Meta’s top three game-changers for metaverse. While state-of-the-art systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude require cloud connectivity for end-user applications, on-board LLMs can function entirely on devices.
With on-board LLMs, Meta hopes to combine metaverse hardware with augmented reality to create an informative heads-up-display for everyday life.
Per the blog post:
“This move is already starting to take place with the arrival of Meta AI on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the introduction of multimodal features in Early Access. Members of the Early Access program can look and ask with Meta AI, getting suggestions and information based on what they see.”
Business messaging
The third entry in Meta’s list of top game changers for metaverse is business messaging tools. “People expect to interact with the brands and businesses they support in new, more personal ways,” reads the blog post.
While the past decade has seen the rise of the enterprise-on-social paradigm where brands interact with consumers on social media for the purpose of engagement, it’s possible we’ll see some of that begin to filter into the metaverse as generative AI tools and the never-ending quest for monetization start to predict the lay of the land in the burgeoning metaverse.
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