metaverse
Power

Zuckerberg to investors: This metaverse thing will be expensive

Facebook's CEO told investors Wednesday that the metaverse will require "very significant investment" for years to come.

Zuckerberg to investors: This metaverse thing will be expensive

Mark Zuckerberg used the company's Q2 earnings call to outline its key priorities for the next few years.

Photo: George Frey/Bloomberg

Zuckerberg has been on a one-man tour to sing the virtues of the metaverse, which continued with his appearance on the company's Q2 earnings call Wednesday. Outlining the company's key priorities for the next few years, he told investors and analysts that "the metaverse is going to be the next chapter for us as a company."

  • Writing that chapter will take a lot of ink. "It is going to require very significant investment over many years," Zuckerberg warned.
  • Some of these expenses will be due to new hires. Earlier this week, Facebook announced the formation of a new metaverse product group headed by Vishal Shah, Instagram's current VP of product. That new group will hire hundreds of additional staffers in the coming months.
  • And then there's the hardware. Facebook has invested billions into AR and VR, and the team behind those efforts is reportedly already close to 10,000-people strong.
  • But don't expect any hard numbers anytime soon. "We're investing billions of dollars annually" into AR/VR, said CFO David Wehner. Analysts wanted to hear some more specifics, but Wehner demurred.
  • Those investments will ultimately be worth it, according to Zuckerberg. "This is going to create a lot of value for a lot of companies up and down the stack."
  • However, the business model for the metaverse is still a bit fuzzy. "Ads [...] will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse," Zuckerberg said, while also musing that people may spend money on avatars and other digital goods. "Over the long term, I think that there's going to be a very big digital economy," he said.
  • Don't expect hardware profits to be a big part of it, though. "Our mission is around serving as many people as possible," Zuckerberg said. "We want to make everything we do as affordable as possible."

Analysts on the call seemed to be a little unhappy about the lack of details, and investors sent Facebook's share price down 4% in after-hours trading. However, this hasn't been the first time that Zuckerberg outlined a massive initiative seemingly on a whim, only to be proven right later.

In 2016, he predicted that "the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video" in a few years. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg delivered a bit of an update on that prediction: "Video now accounts for almost half of all time spent on Facebook," he said.

Janko Roettgers

Janko Roettgers (Twitter, Mastodon) used to be a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

metaversefacebookearningsarvr
Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

cryptocurrencyblockchainbitcoinlawsuit
sponsored content
Sponsored Content

How is technological innovation breaking down barriers and increasing access to financial services?

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
sponsoredsponsored content
amazon web services
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

awsamazon web servicescloud computinganalyticsdata analyticsadam selipsky

Farewell from Protocol

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

machine learning
Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

mlopsaimachine learning
Latest Stories
Bulletins