Microsoft has reportedly terminated its whole industrial metaverse core group, which was composed of 100 employees, as part of the 10,000-person layoff rounds announced in January 2023.
The US-based software giant, plans to abandon the metaverse in favour of other initiatives. According to reports from The Information, the company announced internally the disbandment of the Industrial Metaverse core group, a division of the company directed to bring the metaverse to industrial environments.
The group, which was formed in October 2022, served as a bridge for the implementation of metaverse interfaces to control electrical power plants, industrial robotics, and transportation networks. The division was part of the efforts directed to bring the metaverse to industrial environments by bridging software to this initiative.
The 100 employees that were part of the group were laid off. However, Microsoft said that the products built by the group will continue to be supported in the future. The company is applying its focus to the areas of the industrial metaverse that matter most to its customers and they will see no change in how they are supported.
The recent turn of events suggests that Microsoft is taking part of its resources from metaverse initiatives to put into other areas like artificial intelligence (AI). Other developments indicate that other metaverse projects have been affected by Microsoft’s cuts, with employees from metaverse platform Altspacevr — which announced its closure by March 2023 —and the Mixed Reality Tool Kit, also being laid off.
Microsoft has been putting funds behind AI-based startups since January 2023. In that month, the company disclosed a ‘multi-year, multibillion-dollar investment’ in Openai, the company behind the development of GPT-3 and its ChatGPT interface. Also, as part of this partnership, Microsoft recently announced the inclusion of ChaGPT in Bing, its search engine, and also as part of Edge, its web browser.
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