Minda Smiley

No, I really don't find it surprising.

If anything, I think people will wonder why these cuts haven't happened sooner.

Because I think even though AI and social media still remain incredibly popular, the reality is that a lot of people are actually trying to spend less time on screens, less time with technology.

Even our own forecast showed that next year, at least in the U.S., we do expect users on social media to spend less time on these social networks.

And so, again, that's not to say they still don't spend incredible amounts of time on social, with AI platforms, with technology in general, but there is a bigger push to pull back.

And so I think even a few years ago, it really wasn't the time for the metaverse, clearly, and I think now it definitely is not.

Yeah, I mean, there certainly is some overlap.

But I think, again, even when you look at Meta's business overall, we are seeing how AI is helping the business, incredibly so.

It's helping their bottom line.

It's helping their algorithms become more powerful and keep people on the platform.

longer.

But these loftier goals, these loftier ideas around super intelligence and even the metaverse are, we're just still not there yet.

And I think the demand isn't even quite there yet to be justifying these massive amounts of spending.

I mean, if we even see this with smart glasses, I will say I do think the smart glasses are having a bit of momentum.

They've had some stumbles recently, but there certainly is some momentum there.

But

It's far from, you know, a big portion of Meta's business and likely won't be so for quite some time.

And so, yeah, like you said, there is some overlap, but I still think there's the reality of what consumers are comfortable with now versus what they're going to be comfortable with 10, 20 years from now, which is just really hard to predict.

yeah that's exactly right i mean we are like i said we are seeing how ai clearly is helping their business but i think they are stumbling a lot more with their consumer facing uh ventures in this space i mean even recently uh when you look at meta ai their standalone app um it of course meta ai has been you know worked in all of their major platforms you can use it on instagram facebook whatsapp but the standalone app as of last month only had about three and a half million figure uh users globally

So that's, I mean, three and a half million is a lot of people.