Mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis at Meta
The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. At the time, I was really unsure about my intuition -- I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have <i>some data</i> to back that up. As it stands, my intuition (and everybody else's) turned out to be right.<p>It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. At the height of the crypto boom, I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.<p>Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.