Mark Zuckerberg’s true triumph, three years after transforming Facebook into Meta, is AI.

First and foremost, Meta was originally established as an electronic version of a college yearbook oriented towards introducing students of Harvard on a more personal level. It was much easier for users to create their profiles, share some information, and communicate with other people in this virtual place, hence enhancing the social relations among peers.

In 2019, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company as Meta and began pouring billions of dollars into building a future where people could interact with each other inside virtual worlds. It was a huge leap from when it used to be just a social media website that envisioned a huge virtual landscape named the metaverse.

Since the rebranding, Meta has invested upwards of more than 63 billion dollars into its Reality Labs division, a place where the company puts effort into developing virtual and augmented reality technologies. The company has also been perfecting its Quest headsets-machines known for offering immersive virtual reality experiences. The company even designed augmented-reality glasses with Ray-Ban, a fusion that combines what it imagines for both the physical and digital worlds. But even with those gains, and with some investors questioning its strategy while consumers proved cool toward the new technologies, Meta’s AI research organization pushed forward under the guidance of Yann LeCun, a recognized leader in the field.

More recently, however, Meta’s investment in AI began to pay off. In July, the company announced sales that beat many analysts’ forecasts. They have also introduced new AI tools to help marketers optimize product listings better and generally make advertising on the platform much more efficient. This fresh focus has seen Meta’s stock almost triple in price over the past year, reaching an astonishing closing high of $595.94 per share earlier this month.

But all the euphoria about the metaverse started to wear off as the company increasingly put their eyes on artificial intelligence. This year, Reality Labs is expected to lose $20 billion, of which a large chunk goes directly to develop these glasses and wearable gadgets with AI. The fact that Meta has invested at least US$10 billion alone in developing the AI glasses shows that it will be one among leaders in the new market for spectacles. But industry player Gene Munster gives a very uncertain picture concerning the sustainability of its financial investment into metaverse programs amid growing costs to create generative AI.

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