Facebook parent Meta has set an internal goal of reaching 80,000 paid subscribers for its business-focused virtual reality (VR) subscription service, Quest for Business, by the end of this year. The company plans to make the service available to customers across the world in October 2023.
The paid subscription goal was disclosed in a recent internal post by Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox, which discussed the company's priorities for the second half of 2023. Moneycontrol has viewed a copy of the internal post.
This move comes at a time when Meta continues to stake its future on its ambitious but expensive metaverse bet, while also pursuing its "year of efficiency." The key to the success of these efforts is increased adoption of the metaverse in the workplace, especially at a time when interest in the futuristic immersive technology appears to be waning.
Moneycontrol has shared queries with Meta about the internal memo, and we will update the copy when they respond.
It also comes at a time when tech giant Apple has entered the fray with the launch of its mixed reality headset, Vision Pro, in June 2023. Mixed reality blends the physical and virtual worlds together.
Quest for Business was first unveiled by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's annual Connect developer conference in October 2021. The service offers a suite of features that make it easy for businesses to deploy, manage, and scale Meta's Quest VR headsets within their respective companies.
The service offers device and custom application management, support for Meta work accounts, and single sign-on (SSO) integration through several providers. It is currently in beta and available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
Last year, Meta announced a partnership with Microsoft to bring the latter's work and productivity apps, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams, to its Quest devices. Meta is also working with Accenture to help companies use VR to better engage employees, interact with customers, or create products and services in the metaverse.
Developing VR content & games
In the internal memo, Cox mentioned that after focusing on finding product-market fit in the first half of 2023, the company now intends to focus on scaling up its various metaverse-related initiatives.
The company plans to form a first-party studio that will focus on developing content for its VR platform, Horizon Worlds. They will also use two-player studios to build games and improve their creative tools. In addition, they plan to focus on avatar generation and editing, including adding VR legs, a feature that Meta announced in October 2022.
Sharpened focus on generative AI
Meta is also sharpening its investment efforts towards generative artificial intelligence (AI) as the social networking giant races to integrate the technology into all of its products. The company is also jostling to be a prominent player in the latest AI frenzy that has gripped tech giants and startups like never before.
Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that can generate text, images, sounds, and other media formats in response to short commands or prompts from users.
Meta's generative AI work will "reflect their focus on connection and creative expression while others prioritize utility", Cox said in the post. Earlier this year, Meta had set up a dedicated product team that will focus on integrating the technology into all of its products, reporting to Cox.
During the company's earnings conference call in April 2023, Zuckerberg mentioned that they see "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful".
"We’re exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well. I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses," he said.
Another area of focus will be developing foundational AI language models and making them available through APIs and open source, Cox said in the post.
To be sure, Meta has spent billions of dollars on building similar AI technologies for more than a decade. However, it was reluctant to launch products based on this nascent technology over fears of attracting further regulatory scrutiny.
The soaring success of OpenAI's ChatGPT spurred Meta and other Big Tech companies to launch similar products for consumers, as well as develop solutions for developers who want to integrate these capabilities into their own products.
Earlier this year, Meta released its AI language model LLaMa (Large Language Model Meta AI) to academic researchers on a non-commercial basis. It now plans to soon release a commercial version of its AI model LLaMa that companies can customise, as per a Financial Times report.
In recent months, Meta has also unveiled several AI models, such as Voicebox (a speech-generating AI model), CM3leon (an image-generation AI model), and Massively Multilingual Speech (speech recognition and text-to-speech models).
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