Trading sweat

Hi everyone, it's Aisha in San Francisco. It turns out people don’t like swapping face germs. But first...Three things you need to know toda [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi everyone, it's Aisha in San Francisco. It turns out people don’t like swapping face germs. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Amazon developed an [AI image generator]( • Elon Musk [told advertisers]( boycotting X to “go f--- yourself.” • Google said [Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan are up]( Can’t feel my face It’s the busiest shopping season of the year, but one item that doesn’t appear to be flying off store shelves is [Meta Platforms Inc.](bbg://securities/meta)’s Quest brand of virtual-reality headsets. Part of the reason is that many shoppers aren’t comfortable trying one on in a store. The headsets are prone to collect dirt and grime and [smear your makeup](. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, people were especially resistant to put them on in stores, even though Meta paid to have cleaners on hand to sanitize the headsets between each use, said a former Meta employee who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified. The health emergency is over, but many people are still weirded out by the idea of putting on a VR headset in public. Meta sells the Quest in the US through the stores of mobile carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. The thinking was, people are already trying out and buying other gadgets there. But picking up a phone that other people have touched feels different than strapping something to your face that other people have strapped to theirs. In-store sales of Quest headsets at mobile carriers’ locations are very low, according to former employees of Reality Labs, the division that builds Meta’s VR products. In some T-Mobile stores, for example, only a dozen or so headsets are selling each week. As a result, some T-Mobile locations started moving Quests to the back of the store to make room for more popular products, said one of the people who worked on those efforts. I don’t like sharing anything that goes on my face, either. Once, my friends were taking turns playing a VR boxing game. As I watched their sweat collect on the headset strap, I politely declined to partake. But because VR tech isn’t mainstream, people often need to try it to understand what the hype is about. “The best way to understand virtual reality is to experience it,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg [said]( last year. Meta has also toyed with opening its own retail locations, called [the Meta Store](. The company currently has one showroom at its offices in Burlingame, CA and had plans to open additional stores in New York and Chicago, before scraping the idea due to high costs, said a person familiar with the plans. A Meta representative said there are no officially announced plans to take the retail concept beyond the company’s campus, but that expansion is a natural next step. The upcoming holiday season will be a real test for Meta. It will face the biggest challenge yet early next year, from [Apple’s Vision Pro](. Meta understands the urgency. It just released the latest version, Quest 3, and is offering free games and limited trials of its new subscription games service. Maybe the most significant move to address the challenge of getting people to try on a headset in public: Meta extended its return policy through January to give customers extra time to test the devices in the privacy of their own homes. —[Aisha Counts](mailto:acounts3@bloomberg.net) The big story Adam D’Angelo, an OpenAI board member who helped fire Sam Altman, is [staying on as director](. Keeping D’Angelo is a surprise to many, especially since he’s CEO of Quora, which is increasingly in competition with OpenAI. One to watch [Watch the Bloomberg Originals mini documentary]( on Sam Altman’s chaotic ouster from OpenAI. Get fully charged Stability AI is looking at selling the company as [management faces pressure]( from investors. Alibaba founder Jack Ma broke his silence on the company’s [internal message board]( as troubles mount for the business. Denver ranked as the top metropolitan area where [businesses are adopting AI](. AI tools are already [generating revenue]( for JPMorgan, the bank said. 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