Austin Parker: Yeah. I think we have lost that spirit of – you think back to the ‘90s or 2000s and you go to someone’s Geocity site and you would see just amazing things. It’s why I apologize to anyone that’s really big into the idea of decentralized finance, but it’s why when you heard about people talking about the Metaverse and buying virtual real estate - I’m like, this is so antithetical to the internet. The point of the internet is that you don’t run out of space.

Beau Perschall: A bit, yes. Metaverse is a very loaded term, and everybody has kind of their own connotation of what that is. For NVIDIA, certainly we consider Omniverse a tool, a platform to help enable an industrial Metaverse. Something that is real world. Not only that can do simulation, but can communicate with the real world and back. So there’s this kind of bi-directional messaging that’s aspirational for us. That’s where we want to be able to be, so that if you have a production line, you can actually understand what’s the uptime of the equipment in there, and then basically schedule maintenance, or be able to do factory planning and optimization, so that you’re getting the most throughput you can at any given moment if you have to move materials around a facility.

Adam Stacoviak: Well, the Metaverse route really removes the real world. The augmenting obviously keeps it. So it’s not like escaping reality. It’s more like blending realities, which is what augmented reality really is, right?

Jerod Santo: Okay. So Nick goes in true before the paragraph. Now I’ll read the paragraph. “What’s going on in the Metaverse these days, you might ask? Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, one data point suggests that users may not be returning every day. According to data aggregator DAP Radar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland has 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor, the Sandbox, had 522 active users in that same time.”

That is your details. Now we go back to Amelia. What do you think, true or false? This is your last chance to guess…

Jerod Santo: Well, it’s interesting, because sometimes life imitates art, and we see things like the tricorder, or the different things in Star Trek from the ’80s and the ‘90s, and then we see things like smartphones. And sometimes people pull direct revelation from science fiction; maybe even people named Zuckerberg. So the Metaverse is a thing in a book written – was it Neal Stephenson? I can’t remember the book now. Snow Crash.

Jerod Santo: Well, so I don’t know if you know, but the Substack itself got its start because I listened to the Simon episode, and I was like, “No, no, no. Spellcasting is not the way to view this thing. It’s not something we glorify.” And that’s why I wrote “Multiverse, not Metaverse”, because the argument was that prompting is – you can view prompting as a window into a different universe, with a different seed, and every seed is a different universe. And funny enough, there’s a finite number of seeds, because basically, Stable Diffusion has a 512x512 space that determines the total number of seeds.

So yeah, prompt engineering [unintelligible 00:04:23.23] I have to say this is not my opinion. I’m just reporting on what the AI thought leaders are already saying, and I just happen to agree with it, which is that it’s very, very brittle. The most interesting finding in the academic arena about prompt engineering is that default GPT-3, they ran it against some benchmarks and it came up with like a score of 17 out of 100. So that’s a pretty low benchmark of like just some logical, deductive reasoning type intelligence tests. But then you add the prompt “Let’s think step by step” to it, and that increases the score from 17 to 83… Which is extremely – like, that sounds great. Like I said, it’s a magic spell that I can just kind of throw onto any problems and make it think better… But if you think about it a little bit more, like, would you actually use this in a real work environment, if you said the wrong thing and it suddenly deteriorates in quality - that’s not good, and that’s not something that you want to have in any stable, robust product; you want robustness, you want natural language understanding, to understand what you want, not to react to random artifacts and keywords that you give.

Since then, we actually now know why “Let’s think step by step” is a magic keyword, by the way, because – and this is part of transformer architecture, which is that the neural network has a very limited working memory, and if you ask a question that requires too many steps to calculate the end result, it doesn’t have the working memory to store the result, therefore it makes one up. But if you give it the working memory, which is to ask for a longer answer, the longer answer stores the intermediate steps, therefore giving you the correct result.

Cory Doctorow: Right. So regulation and competition discipline firms. These guys - they want us to think that they’re like evil wizards, because at least then they’re still wizards. They’re not evil wizards. They’re ordinary mediocrities, whose rise to power was co-terminal with the decline of antitrust. We nerfed antitrust continuously for 40 years, and the people who kind of got in on the ground floor of that, where access to the capital markets let them extinguish their competitors, and where extinguishing their competitors made them too big to fail and too big to jail - those people were able to get away with both literal and figurative murder.

[01:09:35.08] And so a better world is one in which we have a dynamic system that can seek equilibrium against a variety of activities and circumstances. Where rather than having to hope that every time the world changes Mark Zuckerberg guesses right, because he is the unelected social media czar for life for 3 billion people, and if he says that our future is being legless, sexless, low-polygon cartoon characters in a heavily surveilled Metaverse named after an idea from a dystopian science fiction novel, then that’s just we got to live with… Instead, if we could have a future where who was in charge changed from time to time, and no one was fully in charge, and everyone had to look over their shoulder and worry that someone else was going to take their users and their suppliers away by offering them a better deal, then we would have a better future.

There isn’t a static future. That’s great. There’s no utopia. The reason that you can’t have a utopia is because even if you get it all right, and everything’s working great, there are exogenous shocks, pandemics, climate emergencies, asteroid strikes. Whatever. Stuff is going to happen. Your country gets invaded. Stuff happens. So the thing that makes a system utopian is not just how it works, it’s what happens when it fails. We have a system that barely works and fails badly. And I would like to replace it with a system that works pretty well, and fails incredibly gracefully. I’m a recovering systems administrator. Far more interested in making sure that I’v got a backup than I am in like the actual speed of the hard drive.

Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, it’s very true. So related to this idea though, of like maybe all these tools just kind of become that thing grandpa used to do when he built for the web, and now we’ve got this other thing… So people forget that Angular was kind of a really big deal for a short period of time… But when tools like Angular and Vue and React were first emerging, the idea of building large user interfaces with state-based UI was pretty novel. Not that it didn’t exist as a concept before, but as a popular one that people really latched on to - it wasn’t a particularly popular approach to building for the web. And so I do really kind of wonder if the platform absorbs these approaches, like what will that next thing be? Because the tools always emerge to solve a specific set of problems. For React, it was “Oh, here at Facebook we have this really overly complex UI that has a lot of moving parts, and managing it sucks. So let’s build something to make that easier.”

I will be really curious to see what problems emerge in the next few years with the web that we have to build a set of tools to try and solve. I am not imaginative enough to kind of come up with what that might be. I heard someone suggest VR once… And maybe, but - I mean, they’ve been talking about doing VR in some fashion for years, and it’s always one of those things that’s exciting for like a hot minute, and then it goes away. Like, the Metaverse made it so laughable, I’m not entirely sure it’ll –

Jerod Santo: You’re too strategic, but your strategy failed by getting that one wrong. Alright, number eight. “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s reasonable that the Metaverse isn’t a place, but a feeling.” [laughs] Sorry… I’m not laughing because of the headline, I’m laughing because of your response to the headline. So don’t try to read my face, it’s not working.

Adam Stacoviak: But it was just this transition from – being in this position seems strange, and I’m curious why you think it may be happening, because they were a hardcore pivot away from obviously the brand of Facebook, which was the brand for so long… To the Metaverse, this idea of VR, that we’ll be doing more business there and more things there in our personal lives; to call the company Meta, to rebrand everything… And that was famously going bad, losing a lot of money. There was a lot of headlines about that. And now, thankfully, they’re able to give it away because their business model is so sound. And I’m just wondering, why? Is it just because they want to be generous to the world? What do you think motivated this seemingly generous thing… Obviously, it is generous to just give away –

Amal Hussein: Fediverse, or Metaverse?

Jerod Santo: It operates in the Metaverse?

Chris Benson: Very inspiring what you’re saying. As you’re looking at the world going forward, and you’re trying to think about like getting those capabilities out into all the places, whether it be something as mundane as you’re in the kitchen, as we talked about jokingly, or whether you’re getting out into vehicles that are either cloud-connected, or on the edge or anything, or maybe even something - another popular topic out there, to throw buzzwords out, with things like Metaverse and stuff… How do you get this capability out into all those use cases in a very practical and functional way for people to start taking advantage of it? Because you have almost unlimited potential in terms of this generative capability that we’re on the forefront of. I have a 10-year-old daughter - I’m imagining, another 10 years out, she’s gonna really have a tremendous college experience, very different from us, because she’s gonna have all these new tools. How are you looking at trying to get this technology into all the places that really affect people’s lives going forward?

Jerod Santo: Yeah. Where will that next platform come from, if it will? Will it be Apple’s next entry into the mixed reality space? I think they’re supposed to be launching their glasses next year, perhaps… Will that be as big as a mobile phone? Hard to believe that it would be. The Metaverse, I think even Zuckerberg saying this thing is like five or ten years out, if it ever comes to fruition in his vision of what that is…

Adam Stacoviak: [01:18:32.06] Do you see the Metaverse playing a role, ever? I feel like the potential evolution of Muse – so maybe Muse 1.0, high impact, great tool… But then the far future version might be like “Well, let’s step into our Muse.” Or like these boards you create it… And you mentioned avatars and collaborations… Do all roads eventually lead to some sort of Metaverse, considering remote work and togetherness? Do you think about that ever?

Jerod Santo: Get your 4 contributions accepted during the month of October and Digital Ocean will plant a tree in your name, or send you the official Hacktoberfest 2022 t-shirt.

Our transcripts repo is a great way to get started. Pick an episode that interests you, fix the unintelligibles in the markdown file, and open up a PR. Legend has it, we operate the fastest merge button this side of the metaverse.

Simon Willison: Right. Not to mention they’ve got some of the best AI researchers at Facebook. So yeah, maybe Facebook’s Metaverse will end up being a prompt-driven 3D environment. That’s feasible. They’ve got 10,000 people working in that division, so they’ve definitely got the bandwidth to take this kind of thing on.

Mikola Lysenko: [03:59] Yeah. So I also have been working at Socket for the last six months or so. We’ve been building a bunch of infrastructure around analyzing JavaScript, and just scanning npm for suspicious packages and weird things, and trying to turn all of that data into something that people can use to detect attacks on their open source projects, or on their code that they’re trying to ship to their users.

Before that I worked in China, not developing any malware or fixing malware, but on building a multiplayer online 3D Metaverse web game, which turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do after the Chinese government regulations completely shut that entire sector down.

And then before that I was traveling around a lot, working on all kinds of different stuff. I live in Hawaii for a bit, and I was in California before that. I was a grad student long, long ago, studying mathematics and computer stuff. So yeah, that’s kind of like my story, condensed into a nutshell.

Daniel Whitenack: Yeah. So I’ve been in the Metaverse, and I think it’s cool that there’s this effort to develop these 3D simulation, 3D worlds, VR, all of that’s cool. And maybe since you’re more familiar with the Omniverse, you can talk about that. But I am not a computer graphics person, but obviously, these are graphic goal processing units. So to support those 3D worlds, I think that is one of the things they’re featuring as something that this could enable.

Daniel Whitenack: We’re in the Metaverse now.

Divya: I will hold my thoughts on the Metaverse…

Divya Sasidharan: Yeah, it’s like the metaverse, and I’m just like “I don’t know if I’m ready for the metaverse…” [laughs]

Jerod Santo: He was quite excited by Pixar’s “first open source software that can robustly and scalably interchange 3D scenes”, but the big open question was (and often is with up and coming open standards) would it be adopted by enough key players to actually become a useful standard?

Enter the newly formed Alliance for OpenUSD with the likes of Apple, Adobe & Autodesk joining Pixar and NVIDIA behind the “standardization, development, evolution, and growth” of this 3D modeling tech that will now surely play a role in Apple’s visionOS and other metaverse-y products. Which begs the question: Where’s Meta?