Meta's Zuckerberg reaffirms commitment to metaverse, AI; Worldcoin struggles

Meta, formerly Facebook, spent billions of dollars in 2022 in pursuit of metaverse projects. In the company’s recent earnings call, founder Mark Zuckerberg reaffirmed that Meta will continue chasing its two priorities, namely the metaverse and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects.

Also read: Italy’s Central Bank picks Polygon for bridging the gap between traditional finance and DeFi

Meta remains sold on the metaverse, AI 

Meta made a public pivot from the metaverse to artificial intelligence, working on AI tools and chatbots for its applications. This fueled an 11% increase in Q2 revenue and drove Meta’s profits to $7.8 billion.

While Mark Zuckerberg’s firm remains intent on pursuing AI further and exploring tools to roll out across Meta’s app ecosystem, the technology giant has not given up on the metaverse. 2022 was a challenging year for Zuckerberg as Meta was hit by losses of $13.2 billion in its Meta Reality Labs unit, the department in charge of the metaverse. Despite the losses, the firm said it remains invested in its metaverse plans.

In an earnings call Zuckerberg said, according to the transcript:

Our investments in AI continue. We remain fully committed to the Metaverse vision as well. We've been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways the two areas are overlapping and complementary.

Worldcoin’s initial interest fades 

Interestingly, since its mainnet launch, the hype surrounding Worldcoin, one of the largest AI projects in 2023, has declined significantly. Sam Altman’s WLD token hit a peak of $5.278 on its launch and pulled back to $2.244 at the time of writing. The token wiped out most of its gains as the AI project is surrounded in controversy. 

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin listed several challenges like security and centralization that could negatively influence the future of the AI project. Despite the declining AI hype, tokens like SingularityNET (AGIX), Fetch.ai (FET) or Render (RNDR), also based on AI, continue to yield gains for holders.

Unlike Worldcoin and other AI tokens, Meta’s push is geared towards integrating Artificial Intelligence with its existing and future applications. The tech giant therefore continues to see promise in AI technology.

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