YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Radoff

lines on the record: 53
first: 2024-07-18
most recent: 2024-07-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Cross platform blew open in 2018, strengthening this network effects of all gaming systems that shifted over. And three years later, we had a gaming world, a digital environment that was very different than we had. The challenge of that question now is very few people actually expected that Cambrian explosion to happen and actually now to your point on gaming, most of those tailwinds have expired. Like there's no new games that are going to shift across platform. Battle passes don't seem to be lifting revenues anymore. Mobile is no longer growing. Social gaming has essentially reached all of its addressable market. There was a hope that virtual reality, that Web3 gaming, that the metaverse would be that next growth engine.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the big commercial deal or interoperation between the big platforms is the most important. I think the interesting thing is if you take a look at 2015 to 2017, it's inextricably linked with the success of the metaverse in 2021, 2022. It's no coincidence that Satya Nadella, that 10Cent roblox Unity, Epic, and Facebook all started talking about the metaverse at the same time. And that's because a number of different things that happened between 2015 and 2018 all matured. iPads became capable of running real AAA video games. We had the rise of battle royales, a genre that has long been contemplated but had only recently become possible with consumer-grade GPUs and with servers able to manage that synchronization. We had the simultaneous rise of microtransactions and battle passes. And then most importantly, the floodgates on”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five minutes playing your game, they should buy a Spider-Man outfit. And they have to hope that they were even able to convince Marvel to give them a Spider-Man license. And so the hope would be actually from the epic perspective, which is a platform, not a content company, though Epic, Fortnite, UEFN, like Roblox and Minecraft are becoming larger, more dominant. There's more user lock-in of entitlements and spend and time and player networks and avatars that actually opening up will start to refer to the rest of the gaming industry.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Billions by now that it did not. And unfortunately, that has bled down right to the bottom. But at the end of the day, what you're tipping your hat at is also true, which is like any increasingly saturated or mature channel, a few platforms are increasingly powerful in every measure, revenue, profit, the developer scale, the profitable developer scale, the predictability and thus safety of incremental investments, and their share of time, data, and consumer spend. And that has made it very hard for all other games to compete. I think one reason to be optimistic, actually, for interoperation, especially from Epic and Roblox, is that by opening up, they are actually reducing some of the barriers to third parties to compete. One of the challenges if you're an independent game developer is you want to bring an entire friend network over to your new game. And then you want to somehow convince them that even though they've only...”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The challenges that the gaming industry are facing are manifold, and that's why we're seeing such turmoil. It's not just interest rates. It's not just capitalism run amok. It is a reflection of several years of accelerated growth, followed by several years in which revenues have actually declined at a point in time in which the cost of labor has gone up, a reflection of both justified increases in individual compensation, an improvement in work-life balance, a shift towards unionization, but it's unfortunately been in parallel to a pullback in consumer spending. It's remarkable to imagine that among every single major media category, gaming is the only one that has contracted since the pandemic, not stabilized at its prior levels, but it's contracted. And that has had pretty significant consequences that are also in contrast to what everyone expected. There's not a single forecast you can find from 21, 22, 20, 23 that didn't suggest that the industry was going to have grown tens of”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gaming is where most people are experiencing sort of 3D internet. The gaming industry is also in turmoil. There's more players playing, there's more money flowing through the system, and there's more Game Studios going out of business. Is that just an industry shifting towards...”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bend will go up and that morse purchases will occur. I will tell you first and foremost, there are actually very few people who believe in the metaverse idea who believe that this is the leading use case. At the end of the day, great, you can be Peeley, the banana in more environments, but it's not clear how important that is. At the end of the day, though, that is actually where we see a lot of the progress being made.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a few different things there. I think one that is perhaps understated because the data is really opaque is that we are starting to see a cap on how much individual users are willing to spend on cosmetics, partly because of what you would call the repeat purchase problem, right? Like how many times are you actually going to buy a Spider-Man skin? It was very new five or six years ago. You got excited. You could be in Spider-Man Avatar with your own backpack. But once you've purchased it nine different times in PubG, in Call of Duty, in Fortnite, your inclination to purchase it again goes down. And we're starting to see that. There was a report out the other day that's showing that Epic is actually making fewer skins now than they ever did before with an increased reliance on third-party IP integrations. And despite that fact, sales are going down. And so there definitely is intent to open that up under the belief that if the utility of a purchase increases, that the willingness to”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is I buy them in Fortnite and I have the same stuff in Roblox. Like that's the first to my mind the first easy consumer term. There's a bunch of technologies that may or may not enable that. The blockchain is supposed to enable that. Who knows if it will? But those are the kinds of technologies that might enable that stuff. Wanting to do it is a different problem. Do you see any desire to want to do that? Because Disney's giving the money to Epic. You have to assume they're going to want to see the return from their investment in Epic versus, okay, now you can also buy the stuff in Roblox.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take the Disney example. It's simple, it's understandable. Disney sells a lot of merchandise, they sell a lot of toys and t shirts and princess hats. I just went to Disney World. We bought all the stuff. The idea that I can buy that stuff in Fortnite. And it won't just go to Roblox when I decide to play Roblox, right? That I can buy these digital goods in one environment and they don't appear in the other one right now. That's the status quo.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of its prohibitions on the iPhone, and despite its protestations against regulators worldwide, the Vision Pro is actually their most open device in quite some time. They support open rendering standards such as WebExR and OpenXR. And if you can believe it, they'ren't now allowing enterprises with raw camera access feed. Even on the iPhone, a developer does not have raw access to what the consumer sees through their smartphones, but they get to do so and then exchange, share, and locally store that information on or when using the Vision Pro. And so the answer is, look, over two and a half years, there's a real cap on how much progress you can see in interoperation. You see more technological improvements and commitments to openness than you are likely to see actual commercial agreements and the amount of actual products deployed is going to be fewer still. But I do think that there's been a great amount of interoperation since.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apple in concert with Disney and Pixar, as well as their Arch Nemesis Epic's own competitor in Unity, Microsoft and Meta, have established what Jensen Huang has called the HTML of the metaverse OUSD as a file format for sharing and exchanging 3D information. Epic is now pioneering a programming language for the metaverse called Verse that various parties have attached to that includes transaction-based memory for the exchange of virtual goods. The Disney announcement alongside their LEGO partnership is clearly oriented towards off-platform exchange of not just world, but user entitlements. Disney said that very clearly. They're like, we will operate, sell, and merchandise separate from the Epic team. Even Roblox has started increasingly open sourcing a number of their different technologies, and Apple for all”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I love this question. It's actually one of the more important reasons for the book update, which is over the last two and a half years, I think most people came away saying that was a bubble. I certainly haven't seen the quote-unquote revolution that I was promised. Meta's name change doesn't seem to have changed their trajectory now. AI is at the forefront. And of course, blockchains have come and gone. As a result, I wouldn't begrudge people for saying, hasn't this been proven? Isn't it dead duly rejected by consumers? The gold this book is really to talk about the arc and progress of those technologies. And I think that those very high level narratives have actually led to us overlooking the very important progress to getting to that end state interoperability being one such example through regulatory action, most of all, but separate from that actually new technology and investments at the platforms, we are seeing that progress.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't want to hand over your world to Disney and Epic and then have a totally different identity in Roblox. Or maybe some people do, but to build the kind of economy you're talking about, the kind of experiences that you're talking about, you definitely need some interoperability. Is there any hope of that coming? Because it doesn't feel like these companies are incentivized to do it yet.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just very counterintuitive now, and I would argue that that is probably one of the challenges of the vision pro today. As I mentioned the Hollywood use case, well, the reality is putting aside that it's $3,500, and I like to remind individuals that in most developed markets, the sales tax on a Vision Pro exceeds the price to purchase a Quest 3. That's how large the price gap is.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seems like it might be the best bet and would say that let's build the supply chains, let's build the software, let's build a highly fragmented ecosystem of software applications, but collectively share the R&D, collectively push adoption, and maybe 15, 10 years from now, we can start to converge into the mythical device that we hope for.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“25 million. And so the trade-off means that you probably want to build to the largest common denominator, not to the top end of the market, but that means you're not building pioneering content that is going to best demonstrate the Vision Pro and drive further adoption. But the premise of the Horizon strategy seems to be that general purpose device for the reasons I mentioned earlier is elusive. And so let's instead do an ecosystem where if Logitech wants to come out with $150 device that is super light, that is only built on cloud or is designed to be tethered to an Xbox or PlayStation only uses controllers and therefore doesn't need external cameras for hand tracking, that that will best advance the ecosystem. If a surgeon wants to build an enterprise version using the Quest hardware, they are never going to need hand tracking. It's not precise and reliable enough. So let's again shift that off.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they've just opened it up to various partners. You know, in my interview with Bos, the CTO at Meta and Edit Reality Labs, he talks about the fact that there are currently three different challenges facing XR devices. And unfortunately, they're a vicious cycle. One is the price, the second is the content, and the third is the form factor. And all three of those things affect one another, right? If you want to improve the form factor, that typically means it's lighter and more comfortable. That typically means it's less powerful, and that's going to impede the content. On top of that, the more skews you have on form factor, the harder it is for any content developer to make something. One of the fundamental premises that Apple had was that they can build a remarkable device that will enrich the content ecosystem. But if you're Disney, as an example, right now you can make something much, much better than is just for the Vision Pro, but the Vision Pro pro probably has 200,000 total unit sales, and the Quest has 20.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess the comparison of Athen is really apt here, right? We're going to give you a second computer in the United States, in mobile generally around the world. We're going to give you a first computer that is an excellent general purpose computer. I think that it was a CEO of Blackberry who said, we didn't realize they weren't competing with us. They were competing with your laptop. And so you've got, now you've got this excellent general purpose computer. It's going to eat everything else. What you are describing is the actual reverse, right? We keep taking shots at a general purpose spatial computer, whether it's the Quest 3 or the Vision Pro or whatever else it is, and the general case is too hard. So we take even more expensive shots at like a vertical, and those might be working. But it's hard to see how you go from the very targeted vertical, expensive to the general, like cheaper mass market.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And right now, those devices are very far from replacing your need to carry your smartphone or iPad or PC to and from work and out shopping. And the few instances in which it does one of those tasks better, it's not good enough to replace any of those devices. And it's not good enough to warrant being held in your bag.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm totally with you. I mean, look, I would say about the Vision Pro, it is clear that it is a remarkably crafted device that can perform some tasks far better than any other device. And yet, I think that those few things that it does better are far short of the things that it does worse. And at the end of the day, the big challenge for any of these head-mounted displays, be it AR glasses or VRMR XR goggles, is that the smartphone's big advantage is it was probably your and my second computer alongside a PC for most people on Earth it was their first computer and thus also their first access pathway to the internet but for everyone today an HMD will be their fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth computer”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's very visual. That's kind of what I'm getting at, right? You've got to put something over your eyes, you got to put something on your head. And that seems like where all of these plans kind of fall down because that technology is the one that has hit the clearest, I wouldn't say dead end, but the clearest stall. This is the best we can do. And it's still very complicated and very expensive and pretty fiddly. And then the utility doesn't overcome the fiddliness.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, we have a billion people a month engaging in a 3D real time environment through Roblox Fortnite Call of Duty and so forth. But if you haven't grown up with controllers in hands, if you're not familiar with dual analog sticks, it's hard. And even if you have, there are fundamental limitations to what you can do in those environments because button mapping is finite and the precision of all of those inputs is still mediocre. And so we naturally assume that if you want to fully leverage 3D environments in the classroom, in healthcare, in design, that you require full immersion into that environment, you need full digital dexterity and that in order to get older generations and more use cases in, you just require those devices. Doesn't require VR, but it at least involves some form of eye-based device.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not more immersive and more varish. I think, again, this is why I talk about the Internet Protocol Suite, is we're experiencing the Internet constantly. We're not actively logging onto it. It's running sidewalks. It's running security badges in our office. It's the way that our on-star guide in a GM vehicle is identifying that a crash has happened and then alerting the authorities. We think of it as this, again, comprehensive, coherent, and consistent network for the ubiquitous exchange of data across all forms of different applications, devices, and intelligence systems, upgrading that to 3D. Now, naturally, when we talk about 3D and we talk about that end state vision where you have more consumer applications, more time, more people more often engaged in these immersive environments, it is sensible that having a more 3D native interface is important. And you can see that.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me just come at that again from the lens of here's what we have today the Vision Pro, we'll just use that, it's easy, Apple doesn't want it to have fully immersive environments, even though those are the most compelling apps inside the Vision Pro. The idea of it is that you will stay in your environment, that you will pass through information. It's not building a simulation of your environment, it's just passing through camera information. There's some amount of AR involved in there. It's actually not a lot. Is that the kind of step you're thinking of, or is it more immersive, more VRish?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is talk about scale, talk about experiences, talk about applications, talk about hardware. And so I have a full spec version of the metaverse that basically says it's a massively scaled and persistent 3D network that can essentially be experienced or co-experienced by everyone simultaneously at some sort of rendering requirement that we consider as basic visual fidelity comparable to the real world and where we can interoperate and maintain various forms of data, our identity, our payments, our objects, our history. And that's an effort to set up that end state so that we can then walk back to what we lack today and then talk about the technological point solutions, problems, and hypotheses for closing those gaps.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So what I'm attempting to do is to define the metaverse not just by saying a 3D internet, but to describe the expansive vision that when Mark Zuckerberg talks about this as a multi-decade transformation, when Jensen Wong talks about a multi-decade decade transformation, Tim Sweeney, what are they actually describing? I use a variety of different modifiers. And the reason why I say this is if you say what's the internet, it's the TCP IP or internet protocol suite. And so actually defining the internet technically is not a very good way to explain to the average person what the internet is. Instead, we want to talk about the internet being a consistent, cohesive, comprehensive way of exchanging data across 110,000 autonomous networks, 4 billion plus applications, 150 million different servers, and billions of end users and devices. But what we don't do in that description of the internet”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI is to building the metaverse. And despite the many ways in which today's transformer models, multimodal LLMs can accelerate that path, most believe that very different systems and fundamental architecture is going to be required.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He calls multi-billion dollar off ramps. And he doesn't besmirch anyone from doing that, but he just says you're never going to get there if every time you see a multi-billion dollar TAM, you pursue it. He has instead made the argument that he believes that actually many of the fundamental premises around AGI from the 70s and 80s and 90s are actually a better pathway. It's just that they were technologically impossible at the time due to multiple different constraints, whether that was edge computing networks, bandwidth capacity, or just the scarce and poor availability of GPUs at the time. And so part of the point of the book is to talk about the end state of the metaverse. Chapter 5 is not just a definition of the metaverse, it's the full spec metaverse. The book itself is designed to tell you how we start to get to that end state, but then to detail the many different uncertainties. But I will say very conclusively that as critical as”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you are highlighting, the perception that transformers solve important use cases today that are much better than the solutions we had a few years ago, but don't scale has actually become increasingly consensus over the last six to eight months. Jan Lakun, who runs the AI division at Meta, is particularly clear about that. He tells researchers starting their careers, don't focus on LLMs. John Karmic is perhaps my favorite example. John was one of the co-founders of id Software. He's considered the godfather of 3D graphics. Later, he became the CTO of Oculus VR in 2014 and left MED in late 2022. He started his own AGI startup. And he has made this argument that he believes that all of today's technologies are incapable of getting to AGI. And he says all of the pioneers have been distracted by what?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to take a quick break, we'll be right back. Back with Metaverse author Matthew Ball to discuss whether the tech we have today is it all suited to actually building the 3D internet. I feel like you're a good person to talk about these ideas with because one of the things that I'm really challenged with the Vision Pro, with AI as it exists today, with digital twins as they exist today, the whole thing is the process by which we get from the products and services we have today and the technologies we use to make those products and services and where we might want to go is one not linear. And then right now it feels to me like I'm not even sure that the core technologies we're using are the ones that enable the next step that everyone wants. So I'll just use AI as an example. I'm really unsure that LLM technology is the thing that can build the AI systems that everyone's actually selling. We've invented a language model and maybe it will never actually reason and maybe we don't want to live in a video game where the AI models are fully hallucinating without any sense of what the player is doing. Do you see that gap, right? I mean, that's kind of what your book is about, is it this is going to happen?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For ads and what have you. That's an important part. And if you rewind three years ago, Jensen Huang took a lot of flack for making the argument that the metaverse was eventually going to be half of world GDP, which still sounds fantastical and is in excess of even my expectations for it. But his perception there was actually the same, right? The fundamental processes of the modern economy would be running through industrial-grade 3D simulations, which in his perspective was the metaverse. rather than just a consumer leisure VR headset experience.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this gets to the idea of the 3D internet, right? It's where we get into the ideas of persistent digital twins, the idea that the way in which you actually solve for self-driving vehicles at level five, at scale with improved accident rates is to build persistent essentially UGC contributed simulations. We know, in fact, that that's a significant part of Tesla's roadmap and part of the Robotaxi plan. They are today building a persistent live unreal engine-based simulation of San Francisco. And their idea is essentially that every single part of their self-driving car network, including privately owned vehicles, would be transmitting LIDAR, infrared, radar scans to build that 3D representation. And not only would that be used to aid the driving cars themselves, it would become essential infrastructure for the city, for emergency services.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're seeing more and more of that, right? Did some of these companies are actively trying to distance themselves from VR, or at least the idea that they only do VR? We see that with Meta and the Ray Band glasses and to some extent with the Apple Vision Pro. Apple only talks about it as a mixed reality device with pass-through that lets you stay in your environment. That's been the big bet in Silicon Valley for a long time. We're going to get to actual augmented reality. We're going to layer digital information over the world you're in. My killer app for that is just please help me with faces and names. I will spend any amount of money. Is that part of your metaverse definition, this more traditional augmented reality that everyone's been talking about for so long?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company, he was quite clear in both the hype videos that they released as well as his own talking points that AR mixed reality, traditional 2D interfaces, and VR were inextricably linked core and parts of the metaverse and that there was no starting or ending line between those experiences. The downside of that was the only device you could buy from them at the time was virtual reality. The only thing that you could really experience of their metaverse group was virtual reality. And therefore, every demo that they had was a virtual reality. That has had this lingering effect where people say the metaverse is virtual reality. Even Neil Stevenson, who largely adhered to that when he wrote Snowcratch in 1992, has publicly separated himself from that idea. But there's still a lingering perception.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interested by your perspective there because I would disagree with the characterization. Now, the tough part about that is that organizational changes are opaque. They're partly for PR and optics, and they're never really going to explain how the priorities have changed. What we know is that Vichal Shah, who is in charge of essentially the software and experiences layer for Quest devices, now also runs the hardware. And now both of those divisions report directly to Bos, who runs all of Reality Labs. That seems like an elevation of the software side of the company. The AR glasses themselves, as I understand them, still report within the metaverse division, still report up through the rest of that team. It does seem that the artificial intelligence layer is coming from another part of the business, but the implementation for that audio assistant is still going through the reality labs group. The more important point that I would argue is if you go back to 2021, when Mark changed the name of the company,”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The data point here that I didn't think of a lot is inside of meta. You actually just talked to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who is sharp on the metaverse and the amount of money he's spending. They restructured, right? They said, okay, look, the quest and the headsets are going to go in this division. The glasses, the meta-ray band sunglasses, that is a great product. It's finding its own product market fit. We're going to put all of our effort there. And they're moving away from the metaverse ideas that prompted the name change into what you might call augmented reality with the Rayband glasses, which are basically just a voice assistant in some headphones and a camera and sunglasses. And that's where the consumers are. Do you see that as evidence that this is actually getting more refined or that 15-year roadmap has another 15 years to go?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back 15 years ago, it was consensus in big tech that this was going to be a solvable problem by the end of the decade. Not just that we could produce the device we wanted, but that we would have in hundreds of millions of consumers would have embraced it. Fifteen years later, companies like Meta haven't even shipped their optical AR display. The introduction of the Vision Pro is simultaneously an affirmation that the era of HMDs is here, yet a reminder that it's very far off for the average person. I'm a little bit more optimistic as to whether or not the Vision Pro has us on the right path, partly because I think when you separate all of the constituent parts, you can see the progress. Our devices have roughly the same battery life, roughly the same price point, roughly the same weight as they did seven or eight years ago, but they have four times the sensors, three times the screen resolution, three to four times the frame rate. They're capable of doing far more. They have spatial audio and so on.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Optimization and trade off choices. And we feel like both of those devices are far away from being mainstream. When you go back to that initial announcement, I remember Jay Peters or perhaps Alex Heath had that leak from Mark trying to reassure his staff. And he said, we actually find this reassuring because the worst thing that could have happened was that Apple had discovered something we hadn't. And instead, he felt reassured that there was no new science. And so the reason why I say this is...”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm sure he can tell you in some vague sense, but my point is just extricating silicon development for the Vision Pro from the rest of their line is difficult. But the point is Tim Cook proudly said this is our most advanced device ever. It's the most sophisticated piece of consumer hardware ever produced. He said 5,000 plus R&D patents went into the device specifically, not the broader corpus of work that might include the Vision Pro 2, Optical AR glasses, but just the Vision Pro. That's about 25% of all patents they've filed since 2015. And so no matter how you allocate that 135 billion, you're getting to tens of billions of spend not identical to Meta, which is also spent on marketing, on content, on device subsidies, but that is to say we now have two companies that have spent tens of billions of dollars, have slightly different stylistic interface products.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think you and I are largely aligned. In fact, your review quoted quite extensively in the book itself because I thought it was particularly insightful in that same regard. And I mean that earnestly, I think of it in a few different ways. First and foremost, I think it is important to recognize that while we don't know how much Apple has spent building this device, we have some semblance of an idea. Since Mike Rockwell, who led the development of the Vision Pro, began his group in 2015, Apple has spent roughly $135 billion on total R&D. They don't have product P&Ls. They probably couldn't even tell you the answer how much did they spend. The investments in...”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start with the Vision Pro because it's the flashiest thing that probably listeners understand it the most is the most different thing. I spent a lot of time with it. I reviewed it. My read of it feels like it echoes yours, right? Like, here's the best we can do. It's nowhere near good enough. There's a part of me that says, and I put this in my review, that maybe camera-based pass-through on screens in front of your eyes, maybe this we should just admit to ourselves this is a dead end. And we have to build some other kind of technology to make this work. Are you seeing the vision pro that way, or do you see iterative steps from this vision pro to something that enables more of the metaverse that you have been thinking about?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there are three areas that have exceeded expectations, and I like to highlight that blockchain is 15 years old. HMDs are head-mounted displays are roughly 70-year technology, and then artificial intelligence is varyingly dated at around 70 in some instances 100 years old. In each of those areas, it feels like the last two and a half years have actually felt more like decades of acceleration. Artificial intelligence is a super clear example. When you take a look at head-mounted displays, the introduction of the Vision Pro, though it hasn't changed the world as we know it today, it's a brilliant case study because it shows you what perhaps the most technically capable, most brand savvy, and most accomplished tech pioneer has and has not been able to achieve with the device category or the form factor. And then blockchains, essentially 70% of all money going into that technology has gone in since that book was published. Probably 95%”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really hard. And so the goal here was actually to separate away from an end state and to instead talk about the minor contributions, the major accelerance, and the overall pathway to getting there, whether we call that spatial or immersive, it's kind of immaterial.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite right. I finished the original book in truly the last few pages where I get a little bit more speculative. And I make the argument that by the end of the decade, many people are likely to acknowledge that the internet that we experience today, that being 2022, had changed. It had become more immersive, more embodied, more experiential, more 3D. But I also say that it's unlikely that we use the term metaverse at that point. In fact, it's unlikely that we used any of the terms save for the word internet and perhaps the 3D internet. The one flaw or foundational flaw with the metaverse beyond its association with dystopian literature, beyond its association with a specific company, and beyond that, perhaps failed projects in both crypto and VR, is the fact that it is very much perceived as an end state, right? The metavers is a fully realized experience. And that makes understanding our trajectory from whenever to this.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You say tip your hand. The title kind of tips your hand, right? You have a definition of the metaverse, it's the spatial internet, it's the 3D internet, I think you call it several times. It kind of is the one you think about where you exist in a video game with other people right now. It's the closest I think we have to it. And that environment persists. You can take actions and you can like pay money in it. You can do all that stuff. Is that still your working model of it? That was certainly the working model when we talked two years ago.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal was very much to detail all of the technologies, the trends, the behaviors and the key quandaries that are going to affect the development of the metaverse, the spatial internet, the 3D internet, what have you. I did not want to advocate for any individual philosophy, business model, technology, or even theory. Of course, a reader can nevertheless understand where I'm kind of tipping my hat and the version of the metaverse that I would most like. But the goal was to take a more factual basis and explain to readers how we got here, where we might need to go, so that whether or not you were a content marketer, an entrepreneur, a large company executive, you could understand these trends holistically and then make your bets accordingly.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stylistically The first time I read the book, and then as I was reading the new version, it feels like a textbook in a good way. If you don't know anything, you can read this book and sort of understand your thinking about the metaverse. There's a bunch of definitions in it which are important. The definitions all build on each other. Is that how you're thinking of this? the way a textbook gets revised over time. You're going to keep revising this book over time.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the book is a comprehensive update, revision expansion to that 2022 title. It's about 70% net new in content, 40% longer. And so the subtitle might seem smaller, the book itself is actually a lot more expansive. Artificial intelligence being one of those categories. But I'll tell you, I never really loved the subtitle. It was actually very off-piece for me stylistically. So I did use this book as an opportunity to change that, just like I updated and improved a lot of the original text.”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were last on the show in 2022. The book did have a different title. It was much more expansive title. It was The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything. You change the title, it's a little smaller. Tell me about that. What's going on with this book?”
2024-07-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What happened to the metaverse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT