According to Financial Times journalist Jemaima Kelly, venture capital investors have reduced their investment in projects related to the metaverse due to a general decline in interest in the topic.
Instead, it is now more popular to raise funds in the development of “generative AI” — artificial intelligence that can create a variety of content: text or images.
According to the FT, venture capital investments in this sector increased by 425% from 2020 to 2022. In addition, Meta’s domestic investors also show little interest in the metaverse, which led the company’s chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, to admit that the metaverse is only a small part of the company’s efforts.
According to Google Trends, the number of searches with the word “metaverse” has decreased by 80% over the past year. The Reality Labs division, which specializes in developing the Meta Quest headset, ended 2022 with a loss of $13.7 billion.
In addition, Meta has postponed the hiring of about 10 thousand employees from EU countries to work on the metaverse. And another tech giant, Microsoft, fired its metaverse development team four months after its creation. There were 100 employees on the street.
Jemaima Kelly also spoke about this with George Washington University professor Dave Karpf. He is a specialist in the study of the Internet. He is sure that no matter how perfect the gadgets are now, people are not currently showing enough interest in the metaverse.
