Meta's CTO was asked whether the term 'metaverse' did more harm than good. He chuckled and compared it to the early confusion over the word 'internet.'
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- On Monday, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth hosted a Q&A session on Instagram.
- Bosworth was asked whether he felt the term "metaverse" did more harm than good.
- The metaverse, once Mark Zuckerberg's greatest obsession, is now barely mentioned.
It's been almost two years since Facebook rebranded itself to Meta to focus on its metaverse mission. But if you're still scratching your head over the term "metaverse," don't worry, Meta's chief technology officer gets your confusion.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth – who runs the company's metaverse development division, Reality Labs – hosted an "ask-me-anything" session in which he took questions from the public via his Instagram story.
Bosworth answered several questions from viewers ranging from queries on Meta's forthcoming Quest 3 headset, to his coffee preferences – he apparently doesn't drink coffee – and to a rather loaded question on semantics: "Did the term Metaverse do more harm than good?"
Bosworth initially chuckled and then reassured viewers that there was nothing wrong with the term itself. "It does lack definition because we haven't given it full definition yet," he said.
He then compared the ambiguity around the definition of the metaverse to the confusion people experienced in the early 1990s when they were making sense of the internet. "The internet actually is still, to this day, kind of hard to define," he said, adding: "Except that we all know what it is because we use it."
Bosworth said that the issue with the metaverse is that even the people working on it have different understandings of the term. Though, that's normal when you're working on developing new technologies, he added.
At the same time, Bosworth admitted that Meta never expected its rebrand — and by extension the term metaverse — to garner so much attention. "We were worried that people wouldn't even notice," he said, adding: "We definitely exceeded our goals on the rebrand."
Just over a year ago, company insiders said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg could talk of nothing else but the metaverse and he was prepping for this technology to be the future of the internet. But after funneling billions of dollars into it, it never really took off. Reality Labs was included in Meta's recent layoffs, and Zuckerberg seems to have since shifted focus to AI.
Meta did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.