I wonder why so few people make the comparison to the recent VR hype. We heard the same things there about its unlimited potential, how it's inevitable that we will soon resolve all its shortcomings and that it will become ubiquitous.
I still believe VR will eventually live up to its potential, but no one can deny that bubble has popped after Meta took a huge loss on it. It took too long to resolve the hard problems so the timing didn't work for them.
AI can maintain the multiverse and administrate it. Everyone can create just by talking.
Coding would also be a good usecase, to see the architecure in 3D and talk with Claude, point at stuff, pick him up and put him where the work needs to be done.
I think it's a match made in heaven, AI is just still way too slow an expensive for this.
Nobody cared about multiverses before AI, and it wasn't because of the lack of maintenance and administration. It's just a thing that nobody cares about, AI improve it but it's not going to make people care about it so that doesn't really change anything.
Okay, but why would they? And who's going to consume?
If anyone can trivially create, every creation is meaningless. There is no billion-dollar business in abandoned Minecraft servers, so why would this suddenly change when you force people to put on an expensive VR headset to visit them?
Everyone has always been able to trivially create. We live in an attention economy, not a creativity economy. Meaning you can create crap (or ai slop) and people will consume it if you know how to get their attention.
Attention is what gets money. Creation is just fuel for attention. Quality is a part of the equation, but much less important than people generally believe.
Here's a legacy document explaining all this since long before ai or the internet was around: https://archive.org/details/TheManualHowToHaveANumber1TheEas...
Obviously AI people say it's because they don't know what they are doing, but are you going to tell me a company like Apple couldn't figure out how translate those productivity gains into something more tangible?
AI is already a gigantically transformative technology, with a staggering amount of paid consumption, and virtually everyone I know uses it every day, where I don't know anybody who regularly uses VR in any form.
The ship has absolutely sailed on "is AI a world-changing technology", where "are the leading AI companies worth what's been paid for them" is a completely open question.
VR is a toy with a few very narrow areas of application in industry. That does not describe the current status of AI.