Has the metaverse dissolved? The answer depends on your preferred flavour of virtual world.

Certainly, the idea of a consumer metaverse as an actual destination (the social media model) - rather than a way of digitally interacting (the AR/VR model) - is on the nose.

The cartoonish 3-dimensional consumer metaverse may have retreated, but the industrial metaverse - where businesses invest in digital twins and build solid use cases around AR/VR and IOT interconnectivity - continues to develop strongly and attract investor interest.

Barely six months have passed since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT onto the savanna and with that release brought the world of generative AI into the heart of business, and increasingly, public consciousness.

Nvidia’s share price has been trending north all year, and then on May 24th it went vertical, creating the kind of mythical hockey stick curve so beloved by gimlet-eyed start-up pitch-writers. Not bad for a 30-year-old business that was already worth more than half a trillion dollars a day earlier.

Economic upheavals are more akin to droughts than meteorite strikes; they tend to be regular occurrences common across decades and reflect a cycle rather than random catastrophic events (although if we lived long enough, meteorite strikes might feel much the same!) 

There were no iPhones loose in the world before June 2007. None. And no Androids either until a year later. Until Apple dropped the first version of its now ubiquitous phone, the best user experience you could hope for was Blackberry’s graphical user interface, gnarly keyboard, and form factor that while sleek, curvy and blue, would barely fit into a t-shirt pocket. 

The pandemic made them look like superstars. With travel-loving Antipodean consumers locked up at home for months on end, and restrictions on how far they could move from their homes (for example, only 5 km in New South Wales and basically nowhere in Auckland!), consumers headed for the keyboard and engaged in an orgy of online spending.

After a two-year pandemic-fuelled boom, retail eCommerce companies across the world have experienced what researchers at Insider Intelligence and eMarketer characterise as “precipitous deceleration.”

ChatGPT has kicked off a digital arms race, but it’s only the first shot in the huge generative AI disruption that is coming behind it.

Founded in 2004, Facebook took a year to reach a million users. Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for a billion dollars, took two took and a half months.

That didn’t take long. Within weeks of the launch of ChatGPT, as people started to appreciate that the long-awaited AI inflection may have finally dawned, the warnings began.

Conventional logic is that black swan events are rare and infrequent, cannot be predicted (although they seem obvious in hindsight), and affect markets severely.

2022 seems to have delivered its fair share of rare, hard-to-predict and disruptive events. Whether or not they were black swan events, the cumulative effect has been devastating to many.

As the bells start to jingle and the Auld Lang starts to Syne it’s time to lack back at the year, through the blunt and irrefutable lens on the data.