Meta’s Reality Labs, the unit tasked with building the futuristic metaverse, continues bleeding money.
The social media company reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and revealed that Reality Labs logged an operating loss of $4.53 billion while recording $370 million in sales during the period. Analysts were projecting that unit to post a second-quarter operating loss of $4.99 billion while generating $381 million in sales.
Part of it is immense investment in bleeding edge tech that is nowhere near useful or useable. Like their micro-LED (not micro-OLED) displays that they have custom made but that are incapable of competing with existing displays that are multiple orders of magnitude cheaper.
I think that he thinks that throwing tons of money at it will magically make the advancement immediate. The reality is that, just like with software development, after a point, return on investment plateaus and it is not possible to make advancements faster. Without getting hardware into people’s hands at a reasonable cost and enough time to tinker, the problems are not going to get worked out.
Displays gradually improve since like forever, if you want a specific one that doesn’t exist you can calculate roughly when it will exist at a specific price point.
Long haul video game devs did that with GPUs for example.
Guess someone has to throw cash at it, but still…
Yeah. I’m not mad that he’s throwing cash at it, outside of the immense amount of good that that amount of money could do for people, instead of being hoarded and wasted on impatience.
They’re a good ways past the ROI plateau and need to get the displays into the wild before people can figure out how how to make them better (not to mention the literal lab research that’s still needed to figure out how to make the tech competitive in functionality with birdbath which is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and superior in nearly every way).