Zuckerberg Admits He Got It Wrong | The Brainstorm 151

Nick (0:00)

Muse has replaced the metaverse in terms of Zuckerberg's big vision for meta going forward. I think Apple's still the sleeping giant in all of this. Like, if they delivered a compelling Siri AI experience, that would crush, it would crush everything from Meta Muse to Gemini to Chat GPT.

Sam (0:19)

Welcome to The Brainstorm. Today, we are going to discuss Meta Connect and whether VR is back and whether a Tamagotchi agent is the future for all of us. Nick, you are Mr. Meta Oakley Glasses, not on your face.

What did you make of the event? Maybe a high-level summary and then some key takeaways.

Nick (0:43)

Yes. High-level summary is Muse has replaced the Metaverse in terms of Zuckerberg's big vision for Meta going forward. Everything at Meta Connect was centered around Muse, this next operating system.

Brett (0:59)

Are they going to rename the company Muse? Is that where we're headed? They're going to get a new ticker and it's going to be Muse? Someone buy the ticker.

Nick (1:06)

Yes, someone buy the ticker because I think the last one went for a pretty penny. So that's some good alpha if that's true.

It's a good question. I don't know. I think what was very telling, I'll get back to the summary of the event, but he did say and I think either a follow-up interview or that day, what he got wrong back when they pushed very aggressively into the metaverse was that fully immersive VR, AR experiences visually would happen before super intelligence, and what you obviously I think everyone has realized is super intelligence has arrived much faster than most had expected and so it's superseding this idea that we're going to strap on virtual reality glasses and live in these digital worlds. But the event itself, I think it gave a wide spectrum of devices. So on one end, you had audio only, meta Ray-Ban and Ray-Ban, or meta glasses. So no more camera getting rid of some of the maybe privacy concerns. It's just an audio feed so you can use it as a speaker and connect obviously to Muse without having to take out your phone. They announced, I think there's now a hundred different versions of styles for meta Ray-Ban glasses, some with camera, some without, and then on the-

Brett (2:26)

But these are just AirPods with lenses, right? Is that the right way to think about it? Yeah, stylish. Why didn't they all release like a set of AirPods as well?

Sam (2:35)

Just acquire shocks.

Nick (2:36)

I agree.

Look, there are some, as a Muse fan, as an advocate for what they're doing with Muse, I think there were some takeaways here from the event itself, where I said, I don't fully believe in this particular product. We'll get to the Tamagotchi. To me, I think probably unnecessary for how we'll interact with our agents in the future, but who knows? The other one device that we should just mention is their new VR headset, which weighs 100 grams. It does offload most of the compute and power supply to a separate puck, so that attaches at your hip. But it is meant to compete and really demolish all of the specs that came with the Apple Vision Pro. So it's $1,300 versus Apple Vision Pro, which I think retails at $35. It weighs 100 grams, which is essentially the weight of a deck of cards, so it's extremely light.

And it has all of the VR capabilities of a Vision Pro. They marketed really as a, hey, it's a, call it a movie theater on your face.

Sam (3:42)

Hey, you know that product that did terribly? Here's ours.

Nick (3:45)

Here's ours.

Brett (3:47)

Well, but at a different price point, it has a better chance than maybe, I mean, or maybe anybody who's gonna buy like a VR headset already has enough discretionary income that they're wasting money no matter what, so it doesn't matter.

Nick (4:03)

I think it will have success within the VR community. Like the reviews I've read, the device itself, like if VR was a thing for the mass market, this product would be like far in a way the best product out there. The problem is no one really uses VR, right? Like that, it just seems like we are not adopting that technology in mass, partly because, you know, we're too addicted to short form video on our phones and no one really wants to strap a headset to their face all day and be that anti-social or whatever you want to call it. But so they gave a wide range of hardware devices and then everything again centered around Muse. So they had Alexander Wang, head of Meta Super Intelligence, come out, talk about different integrations. Last week, you know, we talked about the Amazon banning Muse. Well, they announced a number of different partnerships with major retailers. So Walmart, I think Dick's Sporting Goods and a few other major retailers are all onboarding and allowing Muse to run wild, free and shop for their digital overlords, or I guess physical overlords and being us. And so, you know, you do still continue to have that out there, that debate. But yeah, it was a broad base, you know, like here's all of our hardware for the next year. We're going to stage some of this out. I think the Tamagotchi device, it's like they call it Muse Charm. That's not releasing until this holiday season, so it should be available right before Christmas.