Sora, Groq, and Virtual Reality (Stratechery Article 2-20-2024)

This is a very deep memo about VR and AR that was sent by Zuckerberg in 2015.In this memo, he shared that VR / AR was going to be the biggest technology ten years from then (by 2025). Mark mentions their urgency about developing a brand, financial, and strategic goal in order to not be left behind by Google and Apple which have an advantage because... See more

Note how different Apple’s strategy is from the vision in Meta’s and MagicLeap’s pitches. These companies point towards radically different visions of computing, in which interfaces are primarily three-dimensional and intrinsically spatial. Operations have places; the desired paradigm is more object-oriented (“things” in the “meta-verse”) than app-... See more

Facebook has bet big on AR and VR as the next smartphone (and as potential liberation from Apple's control), so Mark Zuckerberg has naturally started saying metaverse a lot. But VR today seems to be at risk of stalling out as no more than a subset of hardcore games.

First, I believe VR will be a major computing platform, as or more significant than the phone and PC were. Facebook should sell about 10 million Oculus Quests this year. The headset will continue to get smaller, lighter, higher res, more powerful, and with many more and better apps. This will drive exponential growth the same way it did with PCs an... See more

Facebook has on the order of 10,000 designers and engineers working on AR/VR. They are making a massive investment, and it appears to be working. The only other plausible contender right now is Apple. There are rumors they have a serious effort, but they are ultra secretive so we don’t really know. Google and Amazon don’t seem to be investing in AR... See more

"Once you have a good VR / AR system you no longer need phones or TVs or any other major physical objects - They can just become apps in a digital store."