Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is cutting another 10,000 jobs after ending NFT support and making a lot of noise about AI.
In recent years, Meta’s staff has grown as Facebook’s parent company made clear its plans for the metaverse. However, recent moves suggest that Meta is feeling the effects of changing tech trends and tough market conditions. The company laid off more people one day after “winding down” NFT support.
Meta will shed 10,000 employees and close 5,000 open positions, affecting recruiting, tech, and business groups.
What does this mean for the metaverse then?
In 2021, Meta made a lot of noise about the future 3D internet and changed its name to represent what Zuckerberg called a new frontier for the biggest tech company. As the value of virtual land NFT holdings went up, the news also made people more interested in Web3 metaverse games.
Late last year, Meta restated its goal of making the metaverse, but it has been shifting its message more and more toward artificial intelligence (AI) because of its competitor OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In fact, Zuckerberg’s post today shows that AI is more important than the metaverse when it comes to Meta’s technologies.
“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” he wrote. “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”
Meta stopped supporting NFT on its services yesterday, less than a year after it first started doing so. In May 2022, Instagram started a test of NFT, which let some users show off their art and collectibles.
It was never clear how important NFTs and Web3 would be in Meta’s version of the metaverse.
Based on what has been said today and in recent comments, Meta maintains that it is working toward the metaverse.
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