I think generally I agree with you that this is a stepping stone towards bigger/potentially more important things......but that doesn't change the fact that they've packaged it to consumers as something that seems like it has, at best, close to zero utility and at worst has incredible downsides. I'm not sure why releasing this to consumers helps achieve those goals.
Ad money to recoup the huge investments into datacenters that will do the training of the better models that do the things I mentioned. Meta is working hard on AR, glasses (project Aria), egocentric modeling and spatial AI. At some point they may also pull out the Metaverse idea too, they are still working on avatars too, it's just currently not so popularly hyped.
