Arash Selective

🦔 Meta is shutting down Horizon Worlds on Quest headsets, with the service ending entirely on June 15. The company sent emails to users today announcing the shutdown. Horizon Worlds will continue only as a mobile platform after that date. This follows Meta laying off 10% of its Reality Labs VR division in February. The service was widely mocked from launch, with legless avatars that became memes, and was quickly overrun by children. VRChat remained more popular despite Meta pumping billions into partnerships with brands and artists like Imagine Dragons and Coldplay. A Forrester analyst told Wired that Meta "was trying to solve for a consumer problem that doesn't exist" and that you can't build a mass social platform on hardware most people don't own or want to wear for long. My Take Meta changed its entire company name to signal commitment to this vision, spent somewhere around $80 billion on Reality Labs since 2020, and the flagship social product couldn't compete with VRChat, which people actually use. The Forrester analyst's point about hardware dependency is right. You can't build a social network that requires people to strap a headset to their face. Social products work because they're frictionless and meet people where they already are. Horizon Worlds required buying a headset, putting it on, and entering a virtual world full of screaming children throwing digital doughnuts. That's not a consumer problem anyone needed solved. I think the pivot to AI and Ray-Ban glasses makes more sense as a strategy, but it's worth noting how much money got burned proving something that seemed obvious to a lot of people from the start. Meta's statement says they still believe in VR as "a critical technology on the path to the next computing platform," which is the kind of thing companies say when they're quietly walking away from a bet that didn't work. Hedgie🤗

I've been thinking (and worrying) a lot about how AI will affect things, and I've drawn some conclusions that will drive my own career and thought process over the next few years and I thought I'd share. Humans have always been orchestrators, of knowledge and ideas and tools, we learn a bunch of things and interconnect them to do new or more powerful or valuable things. Technology has always advanced and the new abstractions usually just make us more powerful *as orchestrators* (important). I've realized is that the orchestration layer has changed a lot with AI. You obviously can't just be a C++ or TypeScript orchestrator (coder) anymore and expect to be around a few years from now, you need to move up and learn more / new skills that can be composed, and if you do you can be even more valuable than you were in the past. And orchestration has a lot to do with creating. Creativity isn't about conjuring something from nothing, it's more like being a receiver or antenna, picking up on what's already floating in the collective atmosphere and filtering it through your unique perspective (maybe this is essentially refining taste?). The way to increase inputs to our brain is to learn more, to widen the breadth of what we're learning, and importantly to do it consistently. People talk about taste and agency, but I think the people who will win over the next few decades will simply be the most avid learners. This is already true but it feels like it's just speeding up. I'll end with one of my favorite quotes that seems more and more true every day: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."