Web Summit: Forum hears $1bn Metaverse investment ‘will pay off’

Meta’s $1 billion annual investment in the metaverse will pay off as technology becomes ever more immersive, Naomi Gleit, head of product, told the Web Summit on Friday.

The metaverse is not just about gaming, said Ms Gleit, but has applications in education and in medicine, where its immersive properties are being used to train surgeons. She rejected the idea that the Metaverse is a dystopian vision and said that it would never replace face-to-face interactions but would improve time spent online.

“It’s really important that we make the metaverse accessible via our current products because we’re doing things like making it possible to access the metaverse from your desktop or your drone without having a VR device,” said Ms Gleit.

She rejected the idea that the Metaverse would be controlled by Meta, as Apple and others are also investing in it, and, like the internet, no single entity could control it. Ms Gleit agreed that Meta is making a “big bet” on the Metaverse, but that it is important to take risks for technology and business to develop.

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In the future, she predicted, everyone would have a virtual reality-enabled device in their pocket like they have a smartphone today.

Meanwhile, Naom Chomsky — the 93-year-old, renowned linguist, philosopher and cognitive scientist — speaking via video link said artificial intelligence (AI) is in a cul-de-sac.

Mr Chomsky told the summit that he is disappointed in AI as the systems in use today, while they use an enormous amount of data, do not understand the world.

Gary Marcus, scientist, and entrepreneur, agreed with Mr Chomsky that current AI systems lack general intelligence or any innate understanding of the world around them.

These systems are, however, good for anyone who wanted to disrupt democracy with troll farms and misleading people with damaging false information, he added.

The summit also heard about the use of companion robots to take care of ageing populations around the world, in the absence of a sufficient number of care workers.

Dor Skuler, the chief executive of Intuition Robotics, described his company’s ElliQ robot, which is specifically designed for use by elderly people. “It’s an empathetic, proactive companion that moves into the homes of older adults, exclusively older adults, and helps them deal with loneliness, social isolation, and engagement,” he said.

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ElliQ does not look like a human. It looks more like an Alexa system, with a built-in lamp. This design is to make it clear that it is an artificial system, something that is important so that the elderly don’t mistake it for being human, said Mr Skuler. The system takes note of the daily habits of the elderly person and responds based on this data.

Tim Berners Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web in 1989, said that the internet is set to change so that people have more control over their data.

The internet today requires that people continuously input data into every app and service that they use because data is held in separate data silos. This is set to change, he said, and his new venture, Solid, based at MIT in Boston, can drive this change.

“It lets us store data in a way that’s centred around people instead of apps,” said Mr Berners Lee. “We call this a person online data store — it means that you can use lots of different apps on the same data set.”