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The point of "low hanging fruit" is that it's easy and quick to pluck, which means rapid gains. This is the opposite of that. This is grinding away at the margins for tiny, nearly imperceptible improvements.
They've pulled out the ladder and are scaling to the top of the tree to scrounge a handful of "strawberrries".
The US tech titans are collectively ploughing at least $100 billion into AI capital spending per annum. They are absolutely determined to reach the top of this tree, no matter the cost.
Tech companies ploughed insane amounts of money into stuff like the metaverse as well. Heck, Facebook even changed its name to Meta, yet all we got were some dead malls.
One tech company ploughed moderate amounts of money into the metaverse (about $20 billion total?), all of them are pumping insane amounts of money into AI.
There's a qualitatively different atmosphere between AI and the metaverse, you don't see the US restricting VR tech exports like they are AI tech. AI is just better, LLMs are used in so many places (writing, images, music, code, translation...) whereas the metaverse only exists in VR.
Facebook was hardly the only company investing in the metaverse. If VR is included as well, which is at least adjacent to concepts of the metaverse if not outright intertwined, then the amount of investment almost certainly rivals what LLMs are getting (though data is sparse and a true apples-to-apples comparison is difficult).
I have more faith in the long-term viability of AI than I do of the metaverse + VR. That said, I find the idea of a near-term AI breakout to be highly improbable and decreasing with every mediocre release. At best, LLMs have years or perhaps even decades of research ahead before we get to human-level intelligence. There's also the possibility that the current generation of LLMs will eventually be seen as a dead end and AI focus will shift elsewhere, like how game playing used to be the forefront capturing headlines in the 90s before tapering off into relative obscurity.
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While I agree that the 'metaverse' was useless crap, much and most of the Facebook money has been going more to VR hardware and infrastructure. That has been getting remarkably good, both in terms of direct stats (resolution, image quality, refresh rate, headset weight, tracking fidelity, passthrough video quality) and user experience. The StreamLink/AirLink over Wifi6 works with surprising quality, and even five years ago that was a ridiculous unbelievable pipe dream to get as even some glorified iPad Game gimmick.
It's just the business case kinda sucks.
VR can become a lot better, but it will never solve the fundamental technical hurdle that has always held it back: It's supporters bill it like it will eventually usher in Ready Player One, but without physical movement the tech just sucks. All demos have to make critical compromises with how the player or user moves around, and they usually do it by teleportation or by being on-rails since the alternative is a one-way trip to the floor as the user's cochlea decides that remaining upright is no longer an option.
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