Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, speaks during Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
At Meta’s annual Connect conference this week focused on virtual reality and the metaverse, one word was on everyone’s lips: Apple.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was enthusiastic in debuting his company’s Quest 3 VR headset, which starts at $499 and will begin shipping in October. His company touted the growth of its VR app store — Quest Store — which has generated $2 billion in sales since its debut in 2019, up from the $1.5 billion the company announced last year during the conference.
The big difference this year from the event in 2022 is that attendees have a much clearer picture of Apple’s upcoming entry into the VR market.
The iPhone maker in June announced its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset at an eyepopping price of $3,499 when it goes on sale next year. While it’s Apple’s first major foray into VR, the company’s longtime dominance in premium consumer devices and its winning reputation in hardware has created a buzz that was missing from Meta’s prior industry events.
VR and mixed reality are expected to remain niche markets for years to come, but conversations with nearly a dozen attendees who gathered at Meta’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters this week show the tone is changing for developers and VR companies regarding the potential for an expanding industry.
“There’s curiosity for sure with Apple entering the market,” said Tom Symonds, CEO of the UK-based VR firm Immerse. “Apple has always been able to marry the hardware and the software in a seamless way.”
Prior to Apple’s Vision Pro announcement, the VR industry was going through a bit of an identity crisis, with venture capitalists pulling back their investments alongside the drop-off in Web3 and related crypto projects. Meanwhile, Meta has been losing billions of dollars a quarter building its vision of a metaverse, and Zuckerberg has shown no interest in slowing down, frustrating many Wall Street investors who see only mounting costs.
Apple CEO Tim Cook stands next to the new Apple Vision Pro headset.
Even though Apple’s product won’t go on sale for months and it’s unclear how many people will want it or be able to buy it, the company’s entry has given a sense of legitimacy to some of Meta’s efforts.
In addition to showing off its latest headset this week, Meta debuted the newest version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, developed with EssilorLuxottica. The new glasses, which will cost $299 when they’re available to purchase on Oct. 17, use Meta’s artificial intelligence software via a smartphone so people can identify landmarks or translate signs when looking at various objects.
‘Pushing the bar’
It would have been a “big loss of confidence” if Meta stopped investing heavily to push the VR market forward, said Aneesh Kulkarni, chief technology officer of the VR training firm Strivr.
“Meta is pushing the bar, and who has the money to push the bar?” Kulkarni said.
He added that while $2 billion of app store sales “may not sound like a lot compared to the Apple store,” it’s a big and important number. Apple has a giant marketplace — $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022 — because of the popularity of iPhone and iPad apps.
Josette Seitz, a mixed-reality developer for the social impact company Baltu Technologies, said Apple could have an advantage courting businesses that already use its products, like those that employ iPads to help conduct maintenance and other related services. A company that currently supplies field workers with iPads for inspections or similar tasks could conceivably make the easy transition to the more immersive Vision Pro because of the devices’ interoperability, she said.
At its high price point, the Vision Pro will likely be more of a product for businesses, Seitz said. Regardless, it’s important to have more entrants in the market.
“There shouldn’t just be one company,” she said. “We can’t have this be a monopoly system.”
Gaspar Ferreiro, a developer with the VR firm Coal Car Studios, called the Vision Pro’s price “insane” and said Apple is taking a “big gamble.”
“Enterprises will absolutely take the gamble,” Ferreiro said, noting some businesses will splurge on Apple devices because of the company’s reputation and prestige.
Meta still faces its own challenges. The company has struggled to bring VR into the mainstream despite a yearslong head start, and Ferreiro isn’t sure that the Quest 3’s improvements over the Quest 2, which is $200 cheaper, will be enough to win new customers who aren’t industry insiders or developers.
“The general consumer is probably going to be faced with a conundrum, do I spend another $200 on this other device?” Ferreiro said.
One of the Quest 3’s biggest improvements over the previous version is its so-called “passthrough” feature, which converts a person’s field of vision into a digital format, thus allowing computer visuals to be overlaid on to the physical world. Looking at physical surroundings using the Quest 2 proved to be a blurry experience that lacked color, but with the Quest 3 it’s much clearer and should be more enjoyable to use.
For developers, Ferreiro said, that translates into the ability to create more compelling content and visually attractive experiences that integrate the physical and digital worlds.
Jeffrey Morin, CEO of the Litesport VR fitness service, said the Quest 3 is priced “just outside of my comfort zone for, like, me buying my kid a Christmas gift.”
But he agrees that improved passthrough is very valuable and was crucial for the company’s upcoming mixed-reality app it created for Xponential Fitness that will let users work out with real personal trainers who can be virtually beamed into their living rooms.
As far as working with Apple, Morin said Litesport will look for ways to develop for the Vision Pro as it evolves and the price potentially drops to between $1,000 to $1,500 in the future. Initially, the price is too high and the Vision Pro will require users to wear a battery pack, creating an added nuisance during a workout.
The advantage Apple offers is a base of customers who “are going to be way more likely to pay for a subscription,” providing a recurring source of revenue, he said. Based on Morin’s experience thus far, most current Quest users are gamers who are more accustomed to making one-time app purchases.
Morin said that even though Apple’s product isn’t out yet, he noticed an increase in the number of people using Litesports’ VR fitness apps once it was announced, underscoring the VR community’s overall excitement.
“They fired up their headsets and they’re, like, let me see what’s out there again,” Morin said.
Ultimately, Apple’s move into VR is proof that it’s not just an ambitious Facebook side project.
“It’s not like Mark’s little toy anymore,” Morin said. “Now it’s everyone’s.”
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images
Amazon is considering showing a tariff surcharge on items sold via its site for ultra-low-price items, called Haul, the company confirmed to CNBC.
“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”
Punchbowl News reported earlier on Tuesday that Amazon would “soon” begin displaying the cost of tariffs alongside the price of each product, citing a source familiar with the company’s plans.
The report drew the ire of the White House, which called Amazon’s reported plans a “hostile and political act.”
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Qwen3 is Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
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Alibaba released the next generation of its open-sourced large language models, Qwen3, on Tuesday — and experts are calling it yet another breakthrough in China’s booming open-source artificial intelligence space.
In a blog post, the Chinese tech giant said Qwen3 promises improvements in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual tasks, rivaling other top-tier models such as DeepSeek’s R1 in several industry benchmarks.
The LLM series includes eight variations that span a range of architectures and sizes, offering developers flexibility when using Qwen to build AI applications for edge devices like mobile phones.
Qwen3 is also Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a “thinking mode” for complex tasks such as coding and a “non-thinking mode” for faster, general-purpose responses.
“Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI,” Alibaba said.
The new models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s web interface. Qwen3 is also being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant, Quark.
China’s AI advancement
AI analysts told CNBC that the Qwen3 represents a serious challenge to Alibaba’s counterparts in China, as well as industry leaders in the U.S.
In a statement to CNBC, Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said the Qwen3 series is a “significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance” but also for several features that point to the “application potential of the models.”
Those features include Qwen3’s hybrid thinking mode, its multilingual support covering 119 languages and dialects and its open-source availability, Sun added.
Open-source software generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. At the start of this year, DeepSeek’s open-sourced R1 model rocked the AI world and quickly became a catalyst for China’s AI space and open-source model adoption.
“Alibaba’s release of the Qwen 3 series further underscores the strong capabilities of Chinese labs to develop highly competitive, innovative, and open-source models, despite mounting pressure from tightened U.S. export controls,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focusing on U.S.-China economic and technology competition.
According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.
Wang said that this adoption could continue with Qwen3, adding that its performance claims may make it the best open-source model globally — though still behind the world’s most cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.
Chinese competitors like Baidu have also rushed to release new AI models after the emergence of DeepSeek, including making plans to shift toward a more open-source business model.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek is accelerating the launch of its successor to its R1, citing anonymous sources.
“In the broader context of the U.S.-China AI race, the gap between American and Chinese labs has narrowed—likely to a few months, and some might argue, even to just weeks,” Wang said.
“With the latest release of Qwen 3 and the upcoming launch of DeepSeek’s R2, this gap is unlikely to widen—and may even continue to shrink.”
Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned.
“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”
Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.
Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.
That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.
“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”
The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo.
“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”
Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster.
“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.
Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work.
“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”
Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’schief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.
Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.
“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.