Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse department of Meta has lost $21.3 billion since January 2022

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse department of Meta has lost a staggering $21.3 billion since the beginning of last year.

Looks like Reality Labs isn't the big success the Facebook CEO was hoping for after all.

According to Meta’s second-quarter earnings, Reality Labs, the business and research unit that produces virtual reality software, has lost around $21.3 billion since January 2022.

The department recorded $276 million in Q2 2023 sales, a significant drop from the $339 million at the start of this year.

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And the worst is yet to come, according to experts.

CFO Susan Li said in the report: “For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem.”

She added that the unit recorded an additional $3.1 billion loss this past quarter as well.

Last year, Reality Labs lost $13.7 billion while bringing in $2.16 billion in revenue, primarily driven by Meta’s sales of VR headsets, which Zuckerberg dubbed ‘the first mainstream headset with high-res colour mixed reality’.

Li added she predicts the company’s revenue will hit the same as last year in Q3, however, Meta will likely surpass its budget.

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“We anticipate our full-year 2023 total expenses will be in the range of $88-91 billion, increased from our prior range of $86-90 billion due to legal-related expenses recorded in the second quarter of 2023,” she added.

However, Meta’s financial woes don’t end here.

Comedian Sarah Silverman filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this month for copyright infringement and the unauthorized use of her work.

Silverman, along with Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, are also suing the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, claiming they trained their artificial intelligence bots while using their work without their permission.

According to The Guardian, the lawsuit outlines that writers ‘did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for ChatGPT. Nonetheless, their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT.’

The lawsuit regarding Meta says these authors’ books appear in the dataset Zuckerberg used to train LLaMA, a group of Meta-owned AI bots.