The person in charge of Xirang resigned, and the story of Baidu's Metaverse seems to be coming to an end.

Metaverse and generative artificial intelligence, a pair of concepts that have swept the technology circle since the epidemic, now seem to have a sense of "what's the difference between good and good". At a time when generative AI is extremely popular, Metaverse seems to have become a "passed internet celebrity". Not only major overseas companies have disbanded related teams, but related domestic companies also seem to have lost interest in it. A few days ago, Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu and head of the "Xirang" product, announced his resignation, making the future of "Xirang", the first metaverse product in the domestic market, suddenly become uncertain.

Thinking back to November 2021, it was the time when Facebook announced that it would change its name to Meta and promote the concept of "Metaverse". It was Ma Jie who announced the Metaverse product "Xi Yang" with great enthusiasm. 's arrival “We want this to be a valuable place, not an overhyped place,” he said at the time.

It has to be said that the name Baidu chose for its own Metaverse product is indeed very "Metaverse". Xirang is a homophonic pronunciation of "Xi soil", and the latter is the soil that can automatically proliferate in the legend of Dayu's water control. , also means that the metaverse is a world that can iterate and renew itself.

Baidu chose to set up the main venue of the Create 2021 Baidu AI Developer Conference in the Xirang APP to promote Xirang. However, after two years passed, Ma Jie said this in the circle of friends, "The Yuan Universe will take at least five years and will definitely grow into a towering tree. I hope everyone will give you patience and care." The reason why Baidu's "Horizon Worlds" didn't take off was because it suffered from the same problem as Meta's "Horizon Worlds", that is, the quality of the product itself was really unsightly.

At the beginning of its launch, after users entered the "Xirang" APP, not to mention the "metaverse" elements, the first impression was that it was almost full of signs of rush work, and its prospects were basically all stickers and virtual characters. The model has no bone binding and physical collisions are completely non-existent, which also leads to a "cheap feeling". According to users who participated in the experience at the time, the experience provided by "Xirang" does not seem to be much different from that of Shell VR house viewing.

In fact, if the current "Xirang" APP can be called a multiplayer interactive virtual world, then any current MMORPG game may be more qualified than it.

Objectively speaking, if Meta claims that the metaverse product "Horizon Worlds", which cost tens of billions of dollars to create, has graphics comparable to Nintendo's "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" twenty-five years ago, then Baidu " The picture level of "Hee Yang" is probably comparable to that of the 2009 Korean online game "Dragon Nest". You know, Baidu's Metaverse department is actually a "follower". It is the result of the survivors switching tracks during the large-scale layoffs of Baidu's MEG (Mobile Ecosystem Group) game department in 2021.

Although Baidu's game business has always been unknown, if its former game department could only produce graphics of Xiang's level, then it would not be unfair to be laid off. However, the recruitment threshold of major companies is clear, and Baidu's HR cannot recruit a large number of employees with poor skills to realize the original vision of restructuring the game business. Baidu is obviously not unable to make Xirang's pictures beautiful, but it is limited by the functions it wants to achieve. In order to achieve 100,000 voices and 100,000 people sharing the same screen, it must only be on the screen. Perform shrinkage.

"Ten thousand people on the same screen" is actually a term that often appears in MMORPG games, but many players must know that as long as there are too many people on the screen, lag will inevitably occur. This is also the server-side CPU logic processing and The result is that GPU rendering cannot keep up. After all, if you want to realize user motion data perception, multi-person online data interaction, multi-person same-screen rendering, and multi-person sound effect mixing, the resources required for rendering and the data transmitted will increase exponentially. , it can only be alleviated by lagging. In order to achieve the same screen for 100,000 people and save server resources, Xirang had to reduce the quality of its graphics and character models.

And Xiyang only provides a simple "visiting exhibitions" gameplay. As the impact of the epidemic gradually subsides and large-scale exhibitions return offline, what value can it provide? From the beginning to the end, pan-entertainment projects are recognized by everyone as a shortcut to the world of the Metaverse. Unfortunately, with the current level of hardware or computing power, if you want to realize a virtual world where multiple people interact on the same screen, at most It can only achieve the picture level of online games more than ten years ago. If the graphics are so rough, how can it attract old players who have high requirements for game quality? .

In the final analysis, the vision of the Metaverse is divorced from the current software and hardware conditions. With the current level of chips, network communications, virtual reality, games, artificial intelligence technology, and sociological theory construction, there is no ability to build a parallel to reality. virtual reality.

So, why does Baidu refuse to continue to give Xirang five years? It is most likely because they now have Wen Xinyiyan, and compared with generative artificial intelligence, which has clearer commercial prospects, the illusory metaverse has naturally "fallen out of favor".

Baidu can only choose between generative artificial intelligence and the metaverse, because there are limitations in computing power. The basis of building the metaverse is to render a realistic virtual world, just like a graphics card rendering game screens, all of which requires computing power. Similarly, generative AI such as Wen Xinyiyan requires significant computing resources to derive correct results. In terms of computing power consumption, both the Metaverse and generative artificial intelligence can be said to be gold-eating behemoths. Even Meta, whose market value is fourteen times that of Baidu, is still unable to compete in the Metaverse and generative artificial intelligence tracks at the same time. Two wars.

Back to Baidu, according to Baidu’s unaudited financial report for the first quarter of 2023 recently released, its revenue was 31.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10%. According to non-GAAP ) The net profit attributable to the company reached 5.7 billion yuan, a significant year-on-year increase of 48%. As of March 31, 2023, Baidu's cash, cash equivalents, restricted funds and short-term investments were RMB 194 billion, restricted funds and short-term investments were RMB 188.8 billion, and free cash flow was RMB 3.5 billion.

However, a large company and a large business not only mean that the revenue and profits are outstanding, but also mean that there are many places to spend money. Even if you are a major first-tier manufacturer in the domestic Internet industry, Baidu only has only a few funds that can be used freely. 3.5 billion yuan. As an "All in AI" Internet company, it would obviously be abnormal if Baidu did not choose Wen Xinyiyan, who is more down-to-earth, more promising, and more in line with the company's vision, but continued to cling to the Yuan Universe.

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