The internet looked essentially the same after four years of metaverse investment as it did before. Meta has shut down Horizon Worlds on VR — off the Quest store by March, terminated on June 15 — after close to $80 billion in losses. Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world was supposed to transform digital existence. It did not. Close to $80 billion was spent on a platform that the vast majority of internet users never noticed, used, or missed when it ended.
Transformative internet investments change how people use the internet — how they find information, how they communicate, how they shop, how they create, how they work. Facebook changed all of these dimensions for billions of people. The smartphone changed the physical relationship between people and the internet. Search changed how information was accessed. Each transformation was felt by people who had not anticipated it, creating new habits and eliminating old ones.
The metaverse changed none of these dimensions for the internet users it did not reach. For the few hundred thousand monthly users of Horizon Worlds, it offered a new mode of social interaction that was genuinely different from what had been available before. For the billions of internet users who never joined, the metaverse was an irrelevance — a product category they were aware of, perhaps, but not one that affected any dimension of their digital lives.
Reality Labs spent close to $80 billion in the effort to change the internet’s shape for its users. The effort produced a platform that changed the internet for a few hundred thousand people and left it unchanged for everyone else. Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees in early 2025 and the formal AI pivot acknowledged that the scope of the change had not matched the scope of the investment.
AI, by contrast, is already changing how people use the internet at a scale that the metaverse never approached. Writing tools, search, information retrieval, and creative production are all being transformed by AI for users who had no particular interest in virtual reality. The internet is changing because of AI in ways it never changed because of the metaverse. The difference in scope is the clearest available measure of the difference in commercial and cultural significance.