Editor: Aeneas is sleepy
How hot the metaverse is, we have all witnessed in 2021.
And after the baptism of 2022, the concept seems to have completely cooled down. After burning $36 billion, Xiaoza is still firmly betting on the metaverse, although all we see so far is a dizzy headset and a cold Horizon Worlds.
At the beginning of 2023, in Microsoft's 10,000-person layoffs, the metaverse social AltSpaceVR and HoloLens headset teams were hit hard, and many teams were disbanded in place.
It seems that ChatGPT, which entered the game in December last year, has made big manufacturers look sideways, hurriedly change the layout and switch tracks.
Entering 2023, the metaverse is probably really not fragrant.
Let's just say, a whole regiment.
As part of Microsoft's layoffs, AltspaceVR, a VR-based social space, will officially go offline on March 10.
When it launched in 2015, AltspaceVR became the first social VR experience software along with VRChat, Rec Room and other platforms.
AltspaceVR consists primarily of user-generated spaces called "worlds."
In addition to hosting virtual events such as business meetings and magic shows, users can meet, chat, and more, somewhat similar to Meta's Horizon Worlds.
Although the startup nearly closed in 2017 due to financial problems, the timely acquisition successfully integrated AltspaceVR into Microsoft's own mixed reality ecosystem.
The team wrote in their farewell blog:
When AltspaceVR first launched, our vision was to create a place where people from all over the world could connect and socialize in real time.
We believe in the power of VR socialization to bring people together, make connections, and create shared experiences.
It's a bold vision, and with the passionate help of the community, AltspaceVR has quickly become a place where users make memories, meet friends, find love, and even get married in reality.
Going forward, we see that the VR opportunity has expanded into the commercial space. As a result, we now also have a greater goal: to build more open, convenient, and secure immersive experiences in the metaverse.
To achieve this, we made the difficult decision to shut down the AltpaceVR platform on March 10, 2023, and shift our focus to support Microsoft's Mesh.
Unlike AltspaceVR, though, Mesh is aimed at companies looking to collaborate remotely, aiming to bring social VR to the workplace.
Since the first launch of Mesh in 2021, Microsoft has been working hard to perfect the platform.
We are proud to help unleash the passions of our users, from personal growth to unique and exciting events and groundbreaking art.
In the coming weeks, we also encourage creators and developers to hold a final farewell event and download their own content on AltspaceVR.
Finally, we would like to thank those of you who have used AltspaceVR over the years for bringing an enjoyable and enriching experience to the world.
The metaverse scenery is no more
In addition to announcing the death of metaverse social AltSpaceVR, this massive layoff has also affected the HoloLens headset as a key entrance.
Microsoft reportedly laid off the entire team behind the MRTK framework. According to the original plan, they were supposed to update the version of the software next month.
In simple terms, Microsoft's Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) is a cross-platform toolkit for building mixed reality experiences for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) with the goal of accelerating cross-platform mixed reality development in Unity.
- Provide cross-platform input systems and building blocks for spatial interaction and user interfaces.
- Rapid prototyping with in-edit simulations allows developers to see changes immediately.
- Operates as an extensible framework that allows developers to replace core components.
- Supports a wide range of platforms. (Microsoft HoloLens 2, Meta Quest, SteamVR, etc.)
Since the departure of chief architect Alex Kipman, Microsoft has begun to scale down the HoloLens.
The $22 billion "military contract" that had previously been pinned on high hopes is also likely to be yellow due to technical and ergonomic problems -
Congress recently rejected the military's request to purchase up to 6,900 HoloLens-based headsets.
This time, the closure of the AltSpaceVR application and the layoff of the MRTK team also reflect Microsoft's hesitation about the entire "meta-universe" vision.
After all, even Meta (mainly Xiaoza), which has always been a firm believer, is downsizing the size of this area - laying off 11,000 employees in November last year.
Lay off this pot, ChatGPT does not back
A new round of Silicon Valley layoffs at the beginning of 2023, is AI the culprit?
At present, this speculation seems somewhat arbitrary.
In Microsoft CEO Nadella's layoff notice, he attributed the reasons for the layoffs to "global economic turmoil, changes in people's habits in the post-pandemic era, and the impact of the rapid development of artificial intelligence."
Obviously, that last little sentence greatly exacerbated people's concerns.
On Twitter, many people have speculated that the culprit of Microsoft's layoffs is ChatGPT.
Indeed, as soon as it was decided to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, it laid off 11,000 people. Between the two, there is no way to get rid of the causal relationship.
However, in the opinion of experts, the recent wave of layoffs by Microsoft and other large manufacturers is more due to local economic conditions than recent breakthroughs in the field of AI.
The rise of AI will indeed have a huge impact on the labor market, but they believe that the current wave of technology layoffs cannot be blamed on technology.
"Going back 200 years, people's fear of automation has deepened, and whenever they see new technologies, they fear them replacing humans. So far, however, all predictions have been proven wrong." Aaron Benanav, author of Automation and the Future of Work and a professor at Syracuse University, said.
Blind expansion during the pandemic
Over the past few months, we've witnessed a rapid "Silicon Valley purge."
Musk made Twitter employees "disappear in half" and lay off 3,000 people; Meta lays off 11,000 employees in the middle of the night and staged a "night of horror"; Amazon announced 18,000 layoffs; Salesforce announced 8,000 layoffs to kick off the first shot of the new year.
Retrospectively, this collective layoff of large factories is still due to the rapid expansion during the new crown pandemic.
During the pandemic, people generally spent more time on their home computers, and the demand for online services skyrocketed.
As a result of this phenomenon, tech companies have grown rapidly and recorded records.
And Microsoft is one of the biggest beneficiaries. In 2021, Microsoft's profits soared. Between June 2021 and 2022, the company employed a record 40,000 people.
But last year, economic headwinds changed.
First, people are beginning to re-enter public spaces, their habits have changed, and the importance of home technology services has decreased.
"There's an idea that the pandemic means a permanent change in people's behavior: everyone will work from home and won't go to the store or the cinema. As it turned out, this idea was clearly wrong."
The Russia-Ukraine crisis directly affected supply chains, pushing up prices, and cheap money circulating around the world due to US fiscal policy and "stimulus checks", leading to inflation.
In order to curb inflation, the Fed began to raise interest rates in the hope that consumers would spend less, which reduced demand and the prices of everyday goods continued to fall.
And these changes have a particularly strong impact on the scientific and technological community. According to TrueUp, 175 tech companies will lay off jobs in 2023 and 57,914 people will be affected. In 2022, 1,525 tech companies laid off jobs and 237,874 people were affected.
Take back a round, Microsoft relies on ChatGPT?
Obviously, Microsoft has not been able to escape the influence. Compared with rivals such as Google and Meta, Microsoft is not so dependent on advertising revenue, but its cloud services and hardware divisions are still hit hard.
In the early days of the pandemic, many people bought laptops to work from home, but by 2022, PC sales have slowed down significantly. This year, Microsoft's stock price is down 22% from a year ago.
Benanav explained that when interest rates are very low, large companies are equivalent to having endless amounts of money, and investors let them continue to expand instead of thinking about profitability. But if interest rates rise, you have to focus on earnings, and layoffs are the best way to do it.
Last December, the Fed raised rates again and seems intent on continuing in 2023, with signs that the economic outlook for big players like Microsoft is unlikely to improve.
Nadella wrote in his open letter that Microsoft will lay off employees in some areas while continuing to hire in others.
The field of AI is likely to fall into the latter category. Just like other big players, Microsoft has invested a lot of money in AI because it believes in its huge business potential. And Microsoft intends to spend another $10 billion on OpenAI.
ChatGPT is not currently profitable and has not explored a business model to generate revenue for OpenAI or Microsoft. But AI puts Microsoft at the forefront of change. Microsoft's search engine, Bing, currently lags far behind Google. Its cloud services also lag behind Amazon.
But Nadella already confirmed in an interview at Davos 2023 that OpenAI's technology will be integrated into all of Microsoft's products, including Bing Search, Office, and cloud platform Azure.
Will AI eliminate human workers?
While many jobs are destined to disappear due to AI, some forecasters believe that AI will create more jobs.
Last year, the World Economic Forum predicted that AI would replace 85 million jobs by 2025 but create 97 million new ones.
Kevin Kelly, founder and executive editor of Wired, agrees that throughout human history, technology has been an increase in human jobs, not a replacement for them. In the 1800s, for example, many feared that the advent of the camera would put portraitists out of work.
It has also been argued that AI could land people new jobs in data science and machine learning, but some of these jobs can be low-quality or even dangerous.
A recent Time survey, for example, found that OpenAI was hiring Kenyan outsourced people who paid less than $2 an hour to censor toxic content about sexual abuse, hate, and violent speech. This work has taken a mental toll on these outsourcers.
Yes, everyone is now preaching how much work programs and software can do automatically. But behind the scenes there are countless people who have to check what AI is generating and deal with all the problems.
And these jobs are outsourced to low-wage workers around the world.
Resources:
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-off-entire-teams-behind-virtual-mixed-reality-and-hololens
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/21/23565188/altspace-vr-shutting-down-microsoft-layoffs
https://time.com/6248290/microsoft-layoffs-ai/