While the tech conversation has most recently pivoted to artificial intelligence, Meta Platforms isn’t giving up on the metaverse, though it shifted the focus from fun and games to job training and education at the company’s Future of Work Summit. “When it comes to AR and VR, it’s very obvious to me that one of the most powerful applications is the ability to dramatically improve re-skilling,” Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg said, citing opportunities in skilled trades, teaching and elder care, speaking Tuesday in Washington.

Still in the early stages of development, the metaverse’s benefits to the global economy could reach up to $3.6 trillion per year in additional GDP by 2035, Meta said in a news release for the event, which was sponsored by companies including Interplay Learning, Talespin and Embodied Labs.

While generative AI and chatbots have largely stolen the spotlight, “Clegg said the changing hype cycle is helping the company’s metaverse goals, not replacing them,” Bloomberg reports, quoting him as saying “we can do both. It’s not a tradeoff. One entirely reinforces the other. It’s impossible to imagine people enjoying the metaverse in the future without generative AI.”

For example, Clegg said building virtual worlds quickly by using verbal prompts with AI will greatly enhance functionality and increase accessibility of the metaverse.

The fears about people’s jobs being replaced by AI also presents a natural “opportunity to position the [metaverse] as a way to put more people in jobs, not displace them, Clegg said,” according to Bloomberg, which referenced a bipartisan House bill introduced last week called the Immersive Technology for the American Workforce Act, “that creates a five-year grant program at the Department of Labor to support community colleges and career education centers in deploying augmented and virtual reality in classrooms.”

The same day Clegg was speaking, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) warned at a Judiciary subcommittee hearing that “perhaps the biggest nightmare” presented by AI “is the looming new industrial revolution, the displacement of millions of workers, the loss of huge numbers of jobs, the need to prepare for this new industrial revolution in skill training.”

Meta’s Reality Labs has been pioneering the metaverse with its Quest VR headset line and the Horizon Worlds VR platform. In October, the company introduced the $1,500 Quest Pro AR/VR headset aimed at productivity and B2B.

Interplay Learning CEO Doug Donovan discussed using “Meta’s VR headsets to train workers in trades like plumbing, HVAC systems and electrical services,” explaining that “the technology has helped create a ‘boot camp style’ training that gets people prepared for jobs in five to six weeks versus several months,” Bloomberg said.

Related:
Five Ways the Metaverse Is Shaping the Future of Work, Meta Newsroom, 5/18/23
Facebook Pivoted to the Metaverse. Now It Wants to Show Off Its AI, The Washington Post, 5/14/23
Mark Zuckerberg Seems to Think People Can’t Wait for In-Car VR, The Verge, 5/17/23
The Metaverse, Zuckerberg’s Tech Obsession, Is Officially Dead. ChatGPT Killed It, Business Insider, 5/8/23