Perplexity AI Raises $63 Million, Vision Pro Sales Slow, Meta Takes A Tumble

Perplexity AI Search Engine Raises $63M, vaulting its valuation to more than $2.5B. Perplexity is a search engine that uses AI to answer questions directly, instead of providing links. They plan to use the money to expand globally and offer a new plan for enterprise customers which would include security features and data tracking. Perplexity’s has had three previous funding rounds. The most recent was a $74M Series A round in January which included investors Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others.

Meta's stock took a tumble after earnings and Mark Zuckerberg's renewed focus on the metaverse and AI. The company's market value dropped a whopping $200 B as investors reacted to continued Metaverse investments when Meta's core advertising business is facing continued headwinds. Zuckerberg, however, remains unfazed. Zuck believes AI will eventually become a profitable business, but acknowledged it's a marathon, not a sprint. Meta's stock price soared last year, after taking a Metaverse scale beating in 2022, but it’s gone straight up since AI came along, tripling in price since its lows. Last week Meta launched its new Meta AI based on Llama 3 across all Platforms. This week Meta AI was released to its second generation Ray-Bans, which is an XR device, just without a display.

More on Multimodal AI Ray-Ban Smartglases. Owners of the new Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses 2.0 can now enable Meta AI on their device. The glasses use voice commands to prompt a built-in AI assistant, which can then identify things like plants, cars, and landmarks. The Verge says AI isn't perfect, but it can be a useful tool. Wearable AI that can perceive context, that knows who you are, where you are, and what you are doing (without being told) is the holy grail of technology. Technology wants to be invisible. It wants to turn us into cyborgs, melded with our machines. It sounds scary to say it out loud, but that’s what we want, too.

Meta Opens Its VR Quest OS, now Horizon OS. Meta’s proprietary VR operating system is based on Android. Now that Google is making a VR OS based on Android, it makes sense for Meta to just give it to everyone. It’s hard enough competing with Apple. Meta will also make its App Store compatible with outside headsets. Oculus founder Palmer Lucky told Road to VR, “I always strongly believed that Oculus should endeavor to build a technology platform that powered/supported every headset, even competitors like Vive. This was always the correct strategy. Hopefully it isn’t too late.” ASUS, Lenovo, XBox Will Be First to License Meta’s Horizon VR OS. Yes, you read that right, Microsoft’s XBox VR headset will be using Meta’s Horizon OS.

Musk Says Tesla Is a Robotics and AI Company. Sales are faltering at Tesla, down 19% from a year ago, but new models are on the way. Musk says Tesla will prosper as a pioneer in autonomous ridesharing. He doubled down on autonomous cars and ride sharing, and quadrupled down on robots. “Tesla isn’t a car company,” he said. Though company guidance was downbeat, the market rewarded Musk’s big ideas with a notable 14% bump for the week.

Wearable AI Is On Stage at TED. Again. Iyo's CEO, Ted Rugolo, introduced his custom-molded AI earbuds on stage at the TED conference last week. In an unfortunate coincidence, this is how its creator Imran Chaudhri launched the Humane Pin last year. The $695 (plus $25 monthly T-mobile subscription) wearable AI has stumbled badly out of the gate with a device not up to its purpose. Rugolo says Iyo, which is similarly priced, is a wearable computer powered by your voice. Launching in time for Christmas.

Trace Emerges from Stealth with $2M Pre-seed Round. The co-founders, Greg Tran, Martin Smith and Sean Couture worked together at Magic Leap. Trace plans to launch a creator app designed to easily add AR content to the physical world in the next few months. Trace has been piloting its app with commercial clients like Deutsche Telekom, for whom they did an activation at Mobile World Congress. The round was co-led by Rev1 Ventures and Impellent Ventures.

The Apple Vision Pro Is Moving Slow, Which Should Surprise Absolutely No One. I told Apple that marketing an expensive content-starved developer kit as the next great leap forward in personal computing was a mistake, but they did not listen. Apple knows how to do one thing, really really well: launch a sleek gadget to the entire world with a lavish multi-million dollar campaign that has enormous reach. Everyone in the world has to hear about it. And they did. It was iconic. Then every reporter and analyst in the world, confronted the facts and said “do not buy this expensive developer kit if you are not a developer.” This week Bloomberg’s vaunted Apple XR analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple cut 2024 shipments from 700-800k to 400-450K units. Everyone dropped a big headline on it, which honestly surprised me. Last year Ming-Chi Kuo said last year that Apple would only able to make 450K units due to supply chain issues.

As part of the build up to AWE 15 in Long Beach in June, AWE inducted the first class of 100 XR Pioneers into its new Hall of Fame and XR History Museum. Congratulations to everyone on this well curated list. Every single person here deserves to be on. Hopefully the next cohort will include many of the other names that belong here, including outright oversights like the overly modest co-founder and Managing Director of AWE, Ori Inbar, Zuck, HoloLens co-creator former Microsoft VP Alex Kipman, Cher Wang of HTC, and Ready Player One author Ernest Cline.

“This Week in XR” podcast associate producer Lauren Descher tried all the XR at Coachella. Coachella Quests is a new interactive game for festival-goers where players complete online tasks to earn stamps and experience points (XP) for prizes like VIP access to the “Oasis Lounge,” Oasis lounge keepsake is a NFT that grants players a VIP ticket. Coachella partnered with Avalanche to create this block-chain based loyalty game. “I really enjoyed the Web3 gamification before I arrived at the festival, this gave me something to look forward to. Quest missions involved building a squad, scanning QR codes, completing hunts, and creating art all with the power of immersive technology.” Reports Descher. “You start the quest at http://quests.coachella.com where you set up your account and interact with the Coachella discord community, bridging the virtual and digital world. This unique scavenger hunt got me visiting fun places that I would have not explored otherwise.”

Sanguine Onryo: Haiper AI Anime MV Experience, Infused with Samurai Beat Rhythms by Suno AI. Tampa artist @Kabooki_Kai has been posting striking animation like this piece on Twitter and YouTube, which he says captures “the pioneering spirit of new Gen AI app HaiperAI as it redefines the anime experience. Merging Midjourney AI's evocative art with HaiperAI's innovative animation algorithms, this demo teases a world where narratives flow seamlessly, accompanied by SunoAI's hypnotic, dark, and quirky beats with samurai undertones.” @Kabooki_Kai says, “AI will revolutionize the VFX industry and commercial content production by offering opportunities to significantly reduce production costs and enhance creative freedom. By focusing on learning and integrating these tools, I am not just preparing for the future—I am helping to shape it.”

This column is the basis of the This Week In XR Podcast, hosted by author and Professor Charlie Fink, Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap, and Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, co-founder of RED Camera. This week our guest is Yat Siu, Chairman of Animoca Brands, which is behind the Sandbox and other major web3 and Metaverse companies. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.