Over the last five plus years there has been no shortage of “the next big thing” in the technology space.
First we had cryptocurrency and every company and its digital dog tried to jump on that bandwagon with a token or support for cryptocurrency payments. One of the more prominent firms that pushed crypto was Meta which ultimately abandoned its project in the space in 2022.
That project was seemingly abandoned for something bigger, an entire world in the Metaverse.
Meta, which was Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg and his pals leaned hard into virtual worlds and renamed the company, envisioned a world where we all wore virtual reality headsets and met up in legless bodies.
We were told that the Metaverse would be limitless and comparisons were drawn to Ready Player One where users could play Call of Duty using weapons from Fortnite on Doom: Eternal maps. The trouble was that as soon as Meta announced this, an infinite number of other “metaverse” projects were fired up, each built on different technology with different visions, destroying the notion of this project being one, unified universe.
This week Meta’s VR/metaverse aspirations were sullied when it announced that Ready at Dawn, a company working on VR games within Meta’s Reality Labs, would be shutting down. Reality Labs was drowned in funds but now, Meta is looking to reduce the division’s budget by 20 percent over the next two years. The firm will still be producing VR hardware but the rate at which it’s developed will likely slow to a crawl.
This is sad news as Ready at Dawn has been around for ages. It worked on three God of War titles for the late PSP and it was the developer behind the PlayStation 4 title The Order: 1886. The developer leaned hard into making VR games in recent years, which is why Oculus acquired it last year.
But, with the Metaverse and VR proving to be a tough nut to crack, Zuckerberg et al have seemingly moved on to the next big thing, artificial intelligence. As such, Ready at Dawn has been shut down, effective immediately according to an exclusive report from Android Central.
As for the next big thing, well things aren’t looking good on that once greener pasture these days.
AI has a big problem when it comes to profitability. While the likes of ChatGPT, Midjourney and Sora are impressive, the amount of people paying for these services isn’t large enough to make a dent in the computing bill OpenAI and others receive every month.
The obvious path to profitability is by appealing to businesses but the value of the tech is unclear at this stage and so, decision makers are cautious about the emergence of AI. Sure, many industries have benefited from automation for years and while AI amps that up to the nth degree, not every business needs or wants an AI solution.
When looking at consumers, they don’t want it either. The Verge reports that returns of Humane’s AI Pin now outpace sales with around 7 000 holding on to what could charitably be described as a worse smartphone.
But at least Humane built something tangible people could hold. Other companies developing AI models appear to be operating on the basis that eventually their platforms will inspire all 8 billion humans on Earth to sign up and use their technology.
That sounds extreme but that is ultimately what the “growth at all costs” mentality that has plagued Silicon Valley for more than a decade aims for. The problem is, that it’s not a realistic growth strategy.
Not that growth strategy means anything because these days all it seems to take to get venture capital money is by slapping a few hyped-up words on something and promising it will “revolutionise” the world.
The trouble here is that rarely does a product actually change the world. In recent memory, the last product that really changed the world was the iPhone which paved the way for the smartphones we all use today.
The Humane AI Pin was never going to set the world on fire, especially when one considers that smartphones and virtual assistants could do everything the Pin could and then some. That didn’t stop Humane from trying to convince the world that it was building revolutionary tech that would change our lives.
This is the common trend among the tech billionaires in Silicon Valley. Their success has detached them from the lives of the layperson. Because they can drop $1 000 on a thingamajig without a sweat, they assume that everybody will be willing to take a gamble on the product. Because they think that wearing a VR headset for their 15-minute stand-up meeting is fun, that others will feel the same and work 8 – 9 hours a day with a display strapped to their face.
We’re all for innovation and pushing the needle, but Meta, Humane, OpenAI and others aren’t doing that. They are simply throwing things at the wall in hopes that something, anything, will be as successful as smartphones and social media were.
To our mind, we’re in an age of iteration where big tech companies are simply trying to build on the successes of the past and none of it is working too well because none of these companies has stopped to think about whether they should be ploughing billions of dollars at a time into a project.
These days “innovation” is slapped on everything from subscriptions on mouse peripherals to payment services but really, it should be labelled as iteration because truly, there is nothing new under the Sun.
[Image – congerdesign from Pixabay]
