Llama 4 Heralds New Era of Education Applications in the Metaverse

As the metaverse continues to evolve, a new report suggests that educational applications could be a significant growth area for this emerging technology.

The metaverse is quickly expanding into new applications, and a new report suggests that educational applications could be a significant growth area for this emerging technology.

Metaverse in education is poised to attain a market valuation of $69.4 billion by 2032, commencing from its market capitalization of $3.85 billion in 2024. This exponential surge during the forecast period is fueled by a substantial compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.90%.

Several key factors are driving the growth of metaverse in education over the next seven years. At the forefront is the burgeoning demand for innovative learning experiences. As educators and students seek to move beyond the confines of traditional classrooms, the pursuit of fresh and engaging educational formats has become increasingly critical.

This trend has been significantly amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has catalyzed a widespread shift towards remote and hybrid learning models. In response to this evolving landscape, institutions are now actively seeking to create a virtual campus environment.

The goal is to foster novel immersive experiences for teachers, lecturers, and students, complete with interactive lectures, seminars, and tutorials that will revolutionize the way knowledge is imparted and absorbed.

Hardware will record an impressive double-digit CAGR, with AR, VR, and MR devices expected to become mainstream. On the flip side, the software will record astronomical growth levels, with extended reality software and gaming engines taking up the lion’s share.

In terms of adoption of applications, learning and skills development will be the biggest drivers, with educational apps, cultural understanding, and self-regulation contributing their fair share. Apart from schools, corporations will contribute a chunk to the market share of the metaverse in education.

North America, led by the United States and Canada, will lead markets in education while the Asia Pacific will record the fastest CAGR in the forecast period. Industry leaders include Adobe, Devden, Fotonvr, Hatchxr, Lenovo (NASDAQ:LNVGF), Meta (NASDAQ:META), and Samsung Electronics, among others.

The report notes that achieving a market capitalization of nearly $70 billion in seven years will be an uphill climb. Analysts point out that the technology used in the metaverse is still nascent and will require significant investment for large-scale implementation.

Furthermore, the report highlights the steep implementation costs on the infrastructure and content creation aspects of deploying metaverse in education.

Several governments, including South Korea, have invested large sums to develop metaverse use cases. The goal of these institutions is to generate solutions for the problems of VR/AR hardware and software that are currently hindering the mainstream adoption of metaverse in the education sector.

Meta ups AI challenge with Llama 4 models

Meta (NASDAQ:META) has launched four new large language models (LLMs), including Llama 4 Scout, Maverick, and two versions of its flagship LLM, named Behemoth. The models, which are available commercially, are powered by 17 billion active parameters.

The models have key differences. Scout has 16 experts and fits in an Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) H100 GPU, which Meta says is the “best multimodal model in its class.”

However, the Llama 4 Maverick has 128 experts but surpasses GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 across several benchmarks. Despite being compact, Meta’s statement notes that Maverick has the capabilities of DeepSeek’s coding abilities and scores highly on performance-to-cost ratio.

Llama 4 Behemoth, Meta’s most powerful LLM, is still in development. Upon launch, the company says it will outclass OpenAI’s latest LLM. Given its design as a teacher model, both Maverick and Scout lean on the incoming Llama 4 Behemoth for distillation.

“These models are our best yet thanks to distillation from Llama 4 Behemoth, a 288 billion active parameter model with 16 experts that is our most powerful yet and among the world’s smartest LLMs,” said Meta.

Despite the positive statement, early users of Meta’s Llama 4 models have criticized the LLMs for falling short on key metrics. EQ-Bench maintainer Sam Paech noted that “Llama-4 is performing not so well” in long-form writing benchmarks.

Furthermore, independent evaluations of the models reveal an inability to retrieve information at 300K token context length. However, at 85K tokens, Llama-4 showed glimmers of promises but failed to impress in standard logical puzzles.

Despite the shortcoming, Llama-4 was retrofitted with censorship guardrails, but its open-source nature may see users tweak it in the coming days.

While blockchain is not a priority for Meta, the company is not slowing down on other emerging technologies. AI is the center of its digitalization pivot, with the technology giant racing to integrate its LLMs into its social media platforms.

Outside of AI, Meta has its sights on enterprise