Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” at Meta—a cost-cutting drive that began in February 2023 with the likely goal of diverting resources to AI’s costly needs—keeps getting extended. And it seems to be having a major effect on the company’s augmented reality efforts.
Meta is widely expected to show off a prototype of its first AR glasses, codenamed Orion, next month. (Meta already makes “smart glasses” with EssilorLuxottica that don’t overlay any digital information on the lens, and it makes relatively bulky Quest headsets that offer “mixed reality” AR/VR features on their screens. Orion would presumably fit somewhere in-between these offerings.)
But Fortune’s Kali Hays reported yesterday that the device won’t be powered by custom chips, as was originally planned. This in-house development effort was killed off last year, meaning Orion and its successors will run on Qualcomm silicon. It remains to be seen how much of an effect forgoing custom chips will have on performance and power efficiency.
As Kali reported: “Amid mass layoffs and cost-cutting efforts throughout the company, work on custom chips was deemed too expensive, and the need for the chips too far removed from current business priorities.”
But that’s not all. Yesterday, Meta announced it will kill off the “Spark” toolset that third-party developers have for years used to easily create AR effects for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—and even for exhibitions and art installations, via a desktop application.
Meta’s own Spark AR effects for its stable of apps will survive, but, less than five months from now, bang goes all the work that brands and individual creators have done on the platform over the last eight years.
Now’s a good time to revisit the heartwarming videos about the Spark ecosystem that Meta once published, such as this one about how a creator found purpose in making scary clown-face overlays for U2 singer Bono. People built businesses around making and even selling Spark AR effects, but all those filters and 3D objects will be deleted along with the Spark platform. (Videos that already feature the effects won’t be impacted.)
“This decision is part of our larger efforts to prioritize the products we believe will best serve the future needs of our consumers and business customers alike,” Meta said in a statement that set Jan. 14 next year as the termination date for third-party Spark effects. A separate Q&A says Meta will “prioritize investments in other company priorities,” which is about as vague as you can get.
Spark effect creators, unsurprisingly, are pretty furious.
“It’s a huge disrespect to us and also to the Facebook/Instagram users,” TechCrunch quotes one creator, Douglas Costa, as saying. “Five months to end development? It should be at least a year so that we creators can have a better opportunity to build a new portfolio or find a new job.”
So it will be interesting to see not only the hardware that Meta reveals next month, but also whether the company is still interested in having any kind of third-party developer ecosystem around its AR platform. If so, it will have some convincing to do. But maybe effect development will just turn out to be another job for AI.
More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Intel resignation. The departure of Intel board member Lip-Bu Tan, which the chipmaker disclosed in a filing last week, was down to differences over what Tan saw as Intel’s “bloated workforce, risk-averse culture and lagging artificial intelligence strategy,” Reuters reports. Speaking of the Intel’s struggles, IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article asking whether the company may need a cash infusion from the U.S. government—beyond the $19.5 billion it’s getting in Chips Act funding and loans—to survive.
Hindenburg vs Super Micro. The much-feared short seller Hindenburg Research has focused its attention on AI server firm Super Micro Computer, a darling of the current AI boom. In a report published yesterday, Hindenburg alleged that Super Micro hasn’t changed much since it had to pay $17.5 million in a 2020 settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting violations. As the Financial Times reports, the short seller casts doubt on Super Micro’s innovations. The claims remain unverified and Super Micro has yet to comment, but the firm’s stock has taken a 5% hit since the report emerged.
Apple job cuts. Apple is reportedly cutting around 100 jobs in its digital services group, affecting the teams behind the Apple Books app, the Apple Bookstore, and Apple News. As Bloomberg notes, it’s relatively rare for Apple to cut jobs, though it’s done so four times this year.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
$521 million
—The sum that the U.S. will spend to boost infrastructure for new-style cars, as announced yesterday. The Biden-Harris administration said there are now twice as many publicly available EV chargers since it took office, totaling over 192,000. The new cash will fund another 9,200 ports across 29 states, plus the build-out of some hydrogen fueling stations in California.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Nvidia earnings and California’s landmark AI bill have the AI industry holding its breath, by Jeremy Kahn
Nvidia employees often work seven days a week and until 2 a.m. but golden handcuffs keep them tied to the company, by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
Billionaire Pavel Durov made his fortune building two influential social media giants with close links to Russia. Now, his tech legacy is under threat, by Prarthana Prakash
BYD wants ‘nearly half’ of its sales to come from overseas as it spends billions in new factories outside of China, by Bloomberg
What Nvidia's much-anticipated earnings tells us about the AI industry's prospects overall, by Sharon Goldman
Big Tech wants to keep stealing patents—so it’s going to war with Big Pharma, by Andrei Iancu and David J. Kappos (Commentary)
The U.K.’s quantum advantage is about to pay off—but a government spending review risks squandering it, by Carmen Palacios-Berraquero (Commentary)
BEFORE YOU GO
AI takes jobs. The Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna employed around 5,000 people a year ago. Now it employs 3,800 and, it said yesterday, it hopes the increased use of AI will cut that number to 2,000. Klarna said it already has AI doing the work of 700 customer service agents, boosting its profitability. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that AI is putting people out of work in the Philippines’ decades-old call-center sector, with some estimating the loss of up to 300,000 outsourcing jobs there within the next five years—which could be partially offset by the creation of 100,000 new roles in algorithm training and data curation.
