As Meta continues to lay off employees and clamor to cut expenses, Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious Metaverse project burned through nearly $4 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, while Meta’s net profit dropped to 5.71 billion US dollars, an annual decrease of 24%.
In its first-quarter financial report released on Wednesday, Meta said its VR and Metaverse division Reality Labs recorded an operating loss of US$3.99 billion. Although it was lower than the loss of US$4.28 billion in the previous quarter, revenue dropped from US$727 million. to $339 million.
Meta estimates that Reality Labs’ full-year losses will further expand. Reality Labs' operating losses last year totaled $13.72 billion on revenue of $2.16 billion.
Even so, Zuckerberg still insists on investing more money in the Metaverse and developing it together with artificial intelligence (AI). He said in the conference call that thanks to AI technology, the traffic of his Facebook and Instagram has increased significantly, which has successfully allowed the company to earn more advertising sales revenue.
Zuckerberg emphasized that while interest in AI is growing, some people even think that Meta is no longer focused on the Metaverse, but this is completely untrue, and promised to continue to promote the Metaverse. He said:
AI and the metaverse have been our focus for many years, and we will continue to develop these two areas in parallel.
Zuckerberg mentioned that AI and the Metaverse are related to each other. Meta’s vision for AR glasses involves an operating system with AI as the core, and he is optimistic that it will become an important foundation for the next generation of computing.
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