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Reality Labs has lost $11.4B during 2023 (there's still one quarter left)
- wiradikusuma 3y agoI reckon that those billons are not flushed down the toilet right? They must have produced some IP or tech, that even though not immediately sellable today, can be monetized (patent troll) or integrated into their future product?
- surfmike 3y agoHow many billions has Apple “lost” on the vision pro?
- silvestrov 3y agoLook at how much R&D spending has gone up over the last years, all while macos and iOS does not become any better and new iPhones are straightforward stepwise improvement on previous years version.
- mizzao 3y agoIs this due to the departure of Steve Jobs?
- kossTKR 3y agoOne thing i hope i that this VR stuff will finally make Apple and others think about latency. It still feels snappier to play a gameboy or use a windows 95 computer with a CRT screen which is bizarre. There was this huge push years ago about Retina and resolution because "eye candy sells" but gaming and mobile has been pushing the Hz/Fps game in the last years, and i know the new Apple displays have "Promotion", but still theres tiny click latencies all over the place not to talk about how long it takes many apps to open on "supercomputers". I wonder if anyone has made comparison from click to screen on a gameboy compared to say a macbook pro.
- ectospheno 3y agoGood. Hate the things I love changing for the sake of change. My new iphone IS just as lovely as my old one.
- MikusR 3y ago26 billion in 2022
- msoad 3y agoif Meta ends up being the owners of "Android of VR" by this investment and VR ends up being as big as mobile Zuck will show everyone why they did this. I'm optimistic that Meta's plan is going to work and AR/VR will be a huge market. Gaming and work meeting apps are the core of the VR experience and I'm convinced that many people would want those experiences
- mantas 3y agoMost people don't bother to turn on webcam on work meetings. Vast majority of people don't bother with video calls either and just use old good voice if not text. Why would those crowds bother with VR?
- throwaway4aday 3y agoI hate turning on my webcam but I love meeting with people in VR. It's pretty obvious why when you've tried both.
- notahacker 3y ago(I) you don't need those crowds to have a high value product. Vast majority of people don't own a games console or a gambling account or buy many books either. (II) many of the same people that don't bother turning on webcam at work meetings do care about it when talking to their family or spend hours immersed in MMORPGs or exploring other people's world's through video and being seen to follow all the right trends on social media. Sure, mainstream VR has been "just around the corner" since before the average person had access to the internet and I think there are still technical and fashion questions about how mass market-ready the tech is and whether Meta is remotely the right company to market its Android, but if we judged the long term potential of a tech by people's enthusiasm for being observed by their boss even the internet would have been written off...
- tokai 3y agoIf anything the last couple of years has shown that people don't want VR gaming or work experiences.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThey wouldn't have lost nearly as much if they had just kept the Oculus headsets for their original purpose, mainly VR gaming, and marketed them better to consumers, instead of pivoting so hard on AR, the bullshit "we'll all be living and working in the Metaverse" skit, and mandating Facebook accounts, therefore alienating the VR users, gamers and game developers in the process, basically their entire user market. The Quest headsets are great tech, well priced, and they have some cracking games that get you hooked, but the marketing to the general public was next to non-existent, and the whole mandatory Facebook account plus the paradigm shift from games to AR and Metaverse soured them badly. If they want to salvage this they need to go back to VR games only.
- broast 3y agoI do think AR is the Oculus's best feature and most exciting for games.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoIt really is, high quality passthrough is an entirely new experience especially for people who aren't really into full VR. Even if you're comfortable with VR, using a mixed reality app allows you to keep interacting with people around you which takes that VR time out of isolation and puts it back into daily life. I'm very curious what the rumoured Quest 3 Lite is going to be, I'm guessing it'll be something similar to the Immersed Visor targeted at AR with limited VR capabilities.
- soared 3y agoMeta verse is a long term play, VR gaming is profitable now. FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now.
- indymike 3y ago> Meta verse is a long term play, Metaverse is old. It's literally the dream of the 90s and 00s. Linen labs, second life, every animated live in a village game ever. There is no log term play for the "metaverse". There is for VR computing platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has missed that boat trying to take on the Wii and Wii U lobby. As a concept, virtual universes are actually popular, when you take away the requirement of VR headsets. The barrier of entry is about the cost of an indy game or maybe, a A game title. My kids spend more time playing in the Animal Crossing and Minecraft universe than on the oculus by a mile. Check that, they spend more time in the Goat Simulator or Deeeeer universe.
- soared 3y ago> Meta layoffs result in huge job losses, but the company might now accelerate recruitment This seems immoral.
- roomey 3y agoCompanies aren't moral, their purpose is to increase value to their stock holders
- mynameishere 3y agoIncreasing value sounds very moral to me.
- rizky05 3y ago[dead]
- drexlspivey 3y agoPresumably if you are commenting here you work in a tech company, if it is immoral for a company to make money how do you justify working for one?
- marcosdumay 3y agoYou noticed the GP said making money is not immoral right?
- citizenkeen 3y agoThe morality relates to how you create value and for whom. Not all increases in value are moral.
- soared 3y agoCompanies don’t make decisions, people do.
- nikanj 3y agoWhen you increase headcount you gain both muscle and fat. Every now and then you gotta trim the fat -Management
- fidotron 3y agoNot being a particular Zuck fan or hater I have to admit I like the fact he has decided to spend billions on a fairly out there R&D project. I also happen to believe VR is commercially useless but the R&D will yield tangential technologies that benefit us more directly, such as the control interfaces. People have forgotten that Bezos used to receive very similar treatment over the cloud and everything non book store until it suddenly exploded.
- orzig 3y agoTo +1 and say the same thing another way: If you don't like their strategy, don't buy their stock. Just wait for the innovations to diffuse Xerox PARC-style, and reap the benefits. It might take a decade and return 1% of promised, but the benefits will be felt by billions across centuries. That's how real innovation works. Future me thanks the current investors for their contribution to society. Or maybe the current investors will get rich; that's what keeps them coming back.
- carstenhag 3y agoWell, many people are invested in them because of ETF/index funds. But you are right. They could do awesome stuff generally but they focus so much on a creepy metaverse that really few people want.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoIs it really any different from Alphabet and all the random things they’re working on?
- gumballindie 3y agoA shame. VR had the potential to be a game changer and provide growth. Given the lack of growth driving tech the past decade it would have been a breath of fresh air for indie developers. While fads such as AI aim to deliver destruction VR would have been a net positive.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoYou forgot to mention self-driving cars and SpaceX
- gumballindie 3y agoSelf driving cars are a failure. SpaceX stands a good chance though.
- moralestapia 3y agoI believe "Reality Labs" is to Meta what a black budget is to a country. It is impossible to spend that much money on AR R&D. This is Meta's moonshot factory, and I'm sure this funds 10s-100s of projects that may not have anything to do with AR.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoI can tell you, having first hand knowledge of how Meta runs internally, that this is not the case.
- mcphage 3y agoWhere is all that money going?!
- Philpax 3y agoExtreme research and development. You can look through their blog [0] to get an idea of it. They're working on technology that can't be productionised for years, potentially decades, as part of their long-term bet. [0]: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/ https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/
- daralthus 3y agoHow is money spent on R&D a loss?
- drexlspivey 3y agoWhat else are they supposed to do with all the money they are making? Give up and become a dividend company?
- prasadjoglekar 3y agoI know you're probably being tongue in cheek, but yup. That would have happened already but for Zuck's control with his controlling class stock.
- drexlspivey 3y agoTech companies don’t do that, they always look for the next big thing. Should Apple have kept making Intel macs forever instead of spending tons on R&D for their own chips? Should Microsoft keep selling office subscriptions and not pour money into AI? It’s better for everyone if they do.
- prasadjoglekar 3y agoAT&T was the leading tech company at one point. Yet today they're the mainstay of dividend strategy portfolios. That a company stays "Tech" is a flawed assumption here. At some point, this capital is just being wasted.
- ouraf 3y agoThat's kind of by design, though. One of the mandates of modern corporates is "generate value for the shareholders at all costs". This frequently means betting on and pushing risky ventures to be the first or, even better, the second to set foot on a whole new market. Many gaming streaming projects fell before Microsoft and Nvidia cracked the code, and MS is using it to pull people to their ecosystem. Sony lost a lot of money over the years flailing around with GaiKai until they had a stable streaming offer. Even Google lost much of their investment in Stadia. Similar stories goes with AR games, live streaming, targeted ad services, etc. Some companies have to burn cash and take losses to map all the pitfalls and opportunities of the new market. The whole metaverse thing is poorly define and kinda useless, but executives firmly believe that when you get all the high income families hooked up with eyes and ears covered by technology, you'll be able to advertise and sell products and they won't be able to look away without turning off their entire platform, and most people don't make this sacrifice. They're more than willing to burn a lot of cash and kill many jobs for the small chance of breaking through and reaching that magical market with the excessive ammount of disposable income of the top Apple fans and engagement levels not even tiktok or the most predatory gacha games could reach.
- monkeydust 3y agoI work in the fintech space. A few years back we started on a skunkworks project to see if XR technology has a place in our world, specifically around data analysis, storytelling and insight gathering - more specifically, would it add value beyond doing what people already can do today on monitors and not just be a cool 'gimmick' (though I realised does hold some commercial value in the eyes of our marketing team). After dozens of conferences, lots of client demos, and feedback I am convinced it has a place in our world and we have a much better idea of what and how. The question is when and, in some ways, the hardest to solve for. We could not have done a lot of this without Meta headsets as they were cheap enough to start with and easy to develop on and iterate so personally thankful are taking this long-term bet as it is helping the whole sector. We did contact Meta to see if they wanted to partner in some way or support us as its mutually beneficial but got nowhere, might be case of finding the right person given the vastness of the org.
- kldavis4 3y agoWas any of this R&D work published? Given that you are convinced by the technology, I am curious to know more about how you were using it?
- nologic01 3y ago"Lost" is a strange word to use in this context. Its an investment. An investment is only a loss if its written off because the company decided that the whole project and direction is a dead end. That does not seem to be the case (at least not yet). In any case what is really interesting to ponder reading this piece of news is the gross imbalance of resources in the tech industry and how capriciously they are spent. Imagine spending that kind of money on practically any tech subdomain and it would be transformative. E.g., You could build a completely new mobile operating system. Or you could build an entire new AI/ML oriented language ecosystem and have some spare change. The flip side (in the scenario where the VR hype does eventually get traction) is the enormous moat created.
- chrishare 3y agoYes, that's right, an investment. Am awful investment, that's all (unless it works).
- blackoil 3y agoEven after losing this much, the reported profit for the current qtr is $11 billion. Aswath Damodaran did an analysis of Meta and calculated even if the $100B invested yield 0 in downstream revenue and value it is not impacting valuation of Meta much. I see no reason to take this bet, it may not be best executed but kind of investment I expect to see from trillion-dollar companies.
- DevX101 3y agoA few days ago, I randomly decided to click on Mark Zuckerberg's instagram account and see who he's following. He appears to be following several AI avatars based on actual celebrities, but with different names. There's a Paris Hilton lookalike that's called 'Amber'. The avatars have a few short videos posted which are VERY realistic, I almost couldn't tell the difference. My guess is the plan is to pay real celebrities $$$$ for their image and likeness and turn them into personal avatars hyper customized to each audience. Imagine Kylie Jenner or Taylor Swift personally checking in on how your day was, while actively asking questions, giving commentary, etc. And of course, they'll be ocassionally recommending how awesome you'd look in the latest outfit from <paid brand>.
- Version467 3y agoYou don't have to guess. It was announced at meta connect that that is the plan.
- nologic01 3y agoI am sure if the human soul has any other button in the "Inane but Addictive" collection, Meta will find it, push it and capitalize on it. There is no other entity that has collected so much information on the weaknesses of human behavior and used it to such poor effect.
- shmatt 3y agoI have to wonder, for the average HN commenter, does your team have a net positive cash result on your employer. Because statistically speaking it has to be less than 50% Big tech is like a giant VC fund. You have one part, maybe not even that huge, thats printing money, the rest beg SVPs for funding once a year and hope for the best, future gambles that no one expects to generate revenue immediately
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoHow is this not “dumping”? Facebook has been taking massive losses on virtual and augmented reality since basically day zero with the purchase of Oculus back in the DK1 days. That has made it impossible for literally anybody other than the other ologopolists to compete in this space, which arguably will be the long term computer peripheral & data collection system of record. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
- VikingCoder 3y ago$481 per second.
- wigster 3y agoi think the killer app would be porn. having to link to facebook might not help this.
- ksec 3y agoIf Facebook all of a sudden shut down and laid off all Reality Lab. They would have increased their profit margin by ~35%.