Well, which is it? Is it so trivial that anyone can compete, or is it too costly to build it?
I think that's the wrong "either/or" framing in this case. It's not that building competing tech would be trivially cheap, but it's something around which Snap would not likely have a moat or any sort of competitive advantage. It's also in a business area that's pretty unrelated to their core offering.
They tried something, and it failed, and they don't want to say that.
The CEO's exact quote was "Leading in augmented reality means that sometimes we will fail, and I am proud that our team dared to build this business even if we did not succeed." So I'm not sure why you think "they don't want to say that."
And they didn't know these things six months ago?
Given that the initiative was originally announced in March, I'm assuming the whole project was greenlit at least 3-6 months prior to that. And ChatGPT was only just released on Nov 30, 2022, and since then it hardly feels like a week goes by where I'm not mindblown by some new AI announcement. So yeah, I think it's entirely reasonable to think that the landscape when this ARES project was first started is very different than the one we find ourselves in today.
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I think that's the wrong "either/or" framing in this case. It's not that building competing tech would be trivially cheap, but it's something around which Snap would not likely have a moat or any sort of competitive advantage. It's also in a business area that's pretty unrelated to their core offering.
And they didn't know these things six months ago? No. They tried something, and it failed, and they don't want to say that.
The CEO's exact quote was "Leading in augmented reality means that sometimes we will fail, and I am proud that our team dared to build this business even if we did not succeed." So I'm not sure why you think "they don't want to say that."
Given that the initiative was originally announced in March, I'm assuming the whole project was greenlit at least 3-6 months prior to that. And ChatGPT was only just released on Nov 30, 2022, and since then it hardly feels like a week goes by where I'm not mindblown by some new AI announcement. So yeah, I think it's entirely reasonable to think that the landscape when this ARES project was first started is very different than the one we find ourselves in today.