[bredren]

The key early signals from OpenAI FB missed were when OpenAI Five was featured DOTA 2's The International in 2018 and in April 2019 when it beat the pro team OG.

I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar.

But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under fire of a whistleblower / document leak cycle.

Despite all the money spent on VR labs, I always thought the pivot was much more of a Philip-Morris -> Altria thing than Dunkin' Donuts -> Dunkin'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five#Reception

[stingraycharles]

Zuck is all-in on building their own platform and becoming a gatekeeper like Apple, Google and Microsoft, rather than operating within their ecosystems.

VR was one dream to achieve that, it’s more difficult to envision that with AI which is why I suspect he was more reluctant to embrace it. AI models are more likely to become a commodity and running inside one of the platforms of the gatekeepers, which is not what Zuck wants.

[bredren]

That’s fine but this dream was previously pursued with mobile hardware.

FWIW, oculus represented a true competitive advantage. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the Supernatural acquisition was temporarily blocked by the feds.

I think Apple was genuinely worried that fitness was (or still is) a killer use case and threat to Vision Pro.

The delay was enough to make FB lose focus / pivot again into AI.