[foldedcornice]

This observation made me re-interpret the motivation behind Zuckerberg's attempt to start the "metaverse."

If Meta's core business of advertising on social media becomes irrelevant, his company is in trouble. But if the company is already the leader of the technology that replaces social media—e.g. connections over VR—the company can remain a leader and keep growing.

Zuckerberg might be wrong that the "metaverse" is the next step (it absolutely feels more manufactured than a natural next step like with ChatGPT), but I see why he might want to get ahead of his core business losing its value to a new innovation—such as by releasing VR headsets and encouraging people like journalists to consider VR meetings.

In contrast, the Bard release is more reactive, rather than a release that takes the initiative to introduce a new technology.

[pxtail]

In addition to what you wrote above we are entering phase where written content will not be trusted (or perceived as produced by real human being) and there will be absolute, massive flood of it. Tightly walled gardens with ability to verify that participants are humans may strongly benefit from this development. I'm wondering if Apple is going to use this angle for their advantage if they have any concept for tech which could help to differentiate human generated content from bots.