When Meta rebranded itself from Facebook two years ago, "metaverse" hit the mainstream. Even people outside the tech wondered whether soon enough, we would all be socializing via virtual reality headsets. In public opinion and the stock market at least, however, the metaverse has been pretty middling.

Zealously led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta keeps pushing the dream of a world where we meet to work in VR and hang out with our friends in Horizon Worlds, rather than in person. So when Mark Zuckerberg took the stage here at Meta Connect to unveil his new headset, the Quest 3, I had to keep from gagging that he didn't even use the word metaverse.

No, really. Zuckerberg never uttered the word "metaverse" until 33 minutes into his Meta Connect presentation. He played a text adventure game with a Snoop Dogg–inspired AI before he mentioned the metaverse. He used AI to turn his dog into origami before he mentioned the metaverse. He mentioned his fascination with cage fighting several times before he said the word "metaverse.". We have no idea what Mark learned from his Meta Connect rehearsals, but we can imagine that someone sat him down sternly and told him he cannot talk about the metaverse. The bullying would be never-ending.

I don't know when the metaverse actually came up, but after demoing the new slate of AI assistants with specific personalities-these AIs, for some reason, are depicted as celebrities like Naomi Osaka and Charli D'Amelio-Zuckerberg let us know that we will be able to have conversations with these AIs across platforms.

"We're also working on bringing all of this to the metaverse. .. where these AIs will be embodied as avatars, you'll be able to make them as NPCs in the different games and experiences that you build in all of the different Horizon Worlds, and I think that's gonna be really neat," Zuckerberg said at Meta Connect today.

This pivot in messaging isn't surprising-and it's smart, given how Meta managed to make virtual reality, an inherently cool technology, extremely uncool. That marketing shift has been in the works in Meta's last several quarterly earnings calls, where Zuckerberg emphasized Meta's strides in AI, while VR takes a backseat. He even had to clarify that he still is committed to the metaverse.

A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say up front that that's not accurate, Zuckerberg said on an earnings call in April. "We've been focusing on AI and the metaverse, and we will continue to.".

Although the Quest 3 puts Meta in an even pace with Apple's mixed-reality headset, Reality Labs – the division of Meta that focuses on VR and AR – still lags behind. Quarter-over-quarter, Meta's products in VR and AR only managed to rake in $276 million, while its Reality Labs incurred a loss of $3.7 billion.