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Meta Begins Job Cuts as It Shifts From Metaverse to AI Devices (bloomberg.com) 38

Posted by msmash from the no-distractions dept.
Meta has begun laying off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division as the company redirects resources away from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and smartphone features. The cuts amount to roughly 10% of Reality Labs' 15,000-person workforce, according to an internal post from CTO Andrew Bosworth reviewed by Bloomberg.

Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021, and top executives discussed budget cuts as deep as 30% for the metaverse group in December. Meta plans to continue developing its Horizon metaverse platform, but the focus will shift almost exclusively to mobile phones rather than the fully immersive VR headsets the company originally envisioned.
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Meta Begins Job Cuts as It Shifts From Metaverse to AI Devices More

Meta Begins Job Cuts as It Shifts From Metaverse to AI Devices

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  • when they screw that up just as badly.

    • It's almost like having one person holding the majority of voting shares is a bad idea...

      • Re: Will repeat with the AI labs group in 2027... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @11:10AM (#65920756)
        I think it may also have been a bad idea for the media, for a decade, to uncritically and near-universally hail as a epochal genius a man whose big innovation was: rating college women for hotness. Oh, on the internet, I guess.
      • We have a way to quantify whether successes outweigh screwups overall, and that is money. The Cybertruck is a failure that will surely be studied for decades as an example of too much investment following one man's whimsy. On the other hand the same guy picked the major objectives of SpaceX. Which outweighs the other? It's a pretty simple calculation.
      • Look at it from another angle, those people had jobs all this time that maybe weren't needed. You have to create jobs before you can fire anyone.
    • One can certainly draw parallels between the massive overinvestment in Metaverse development that occurred a few years ago and the even more massive overinvestment in AI, especially data center buildout, going on right now.
      • This seems to indicate that Facebook won't be able to successfully immantenize the torment nexus.
        But then again, other people, like Peter Thiel are also trying to push us in that direction.

      • One can certainly draw parallels between the massive overinvestment in Metaverse development that occurred a few years ago and the even more massive overinvestment in AI, especially data center buildout, going on right now.

        True. However, the big differences are current revenue and use cases. The Metaverse had no revenue and no use cases (at least none that people would pay for). That's also the difference between the current AI boom/bubble and the dot.com bubble.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Meta can't focus. And they already seem to have lost track with LLM. At least rumors are they are now rather searching for super intelligence than building new llama models.

  • With about as much chance of it panning out (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @11:16AM (#65920766)
    No one wanted their VR hellscape and no one wants the AI hellscape either.

  • Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dan Posluns ( 794424 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @11:35AM (#65920798) Homepage

    Multiple billions of dollars, more than the GDP of some countries, spent in under a decade on a vision of the future that never even passed a basic smell test. Back in 2020 or so I was working on video game teams and we were seeing a big brain-drain to Facebook, with them basically waving huge wads of cash to poach our people to build their metaverse. I don't think any of the people that left were drinking the Kool Aid (at least not the ones I knew of), but it was a good way to make money fast working on cool tech, even if the customers for it only ever existed in Zuckerberg's imagination.

    • Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @11:58AM (#65920874) Journal
      The exceptionally weird thing about the 'metaverse' hype was how big it managed to get despite existing tech actively suggesting that it would not be all that exciting

      The lesson of video games; all the way back to the multi-user dungeons, is absolutely that there's interest and money in multi-user simulated environments; but also that the field is dominated by task specific implementations. There's not 'the metaverse' where you walk over to the WWII section if you want to play Call of Duty; and over to the fantasy section if you want to play World of Warcraft; and over to your employer's gimmicky virtual office building if you need to teleconference. And this isn't just some imperfect temporary thing: the various implementations actively prioritize different things; including choices where the options are mutually exclusive, in order to be the right thing for the job. There are 'generic' virtual worlds(eg. Second Life); but those tend to pay a pretty heavy cost vs. the specialized ones in order to be generic, and are kind of niche. Second Life is a perfectly viable business if you can keep your operations costs under control; but the idea that it's suddenly going to have the GDP of western europe because 'metaverse' is...dubious.

      Then there's the close competition from things that are, technically, not 'metaverse' as Neal Stephenson and Hiro Protagonist would have it; but are definitely potential substitutes: video games you play with monitors, teleconferencing you do with webcams, stuff you do on the go on cellphones. Obviously there are some things that would be better, or more immersive, or whatever with VR googles; but predicting hypergrowth when the market is already saturated with stuff that is maybe 80% as good is nuts.
    • Ok, I've seen this bandied about a few times: What the heck is the "metaverse"? I use FB, that's it. (And that's bad enough, but that's another post.) Is there something to Meta more than FB? Is it worth anyone's time, or is it just more schlock?

      • If you ask 3 different CEOs this question you're liable to get 4 different answers.

        From the Facebook/Meta perspective, it appears to means a virtual world with virtual avatars that you would use for everything from corporate meetings to social games to who knows what else. But it's also AR glasses. Or something.

      • It was an online chatroom service called Meta Horizon. You could access it with a Meta Quest device, and wander around some empty virtual worlds or play some minigames while talking to random people. That's about it.

        • This bad news makes Lt. Dan sad.

        • We had this in 1994. I used one of the first VRML browsers in around 1999. My friend was working on it before he came to the game company we worked for. It was fun to fly around in VRML land running into random users with bad network connections. We had the metaverse already. It wasn't cool then for the same reasons it isn't cool now. VR is not really that great if it doesn't interface directly with your brain. VR goggles are good for telepresence - drone pilots or robot operators. I'm sure there's a market

  • They are doing everything they can to drive me away from their platforms. My main use of FB at this point is to stay in communication with some people and a couple of special interest groups I run.

  • > Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021

    That is more than $1B per month!

  • Flailing (Score:3)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @12:01PM (#65920884)

    Zuck had an idea once of how to appeal to peoples' basest instincts, and rode it to a substantial fortune. Since then, all he knows how to do is chase the latest trend, and he's not very good at it.

  • I have no idea what Zuck was thinking the Metaverse would become. Second Life (is / was) an earlier version of what it sounds like he was thinking for the Metaverse. And that turned out horribly for just about everyone. The primary activity, other than sexual assault or violence, was gambling, followed by speculation on "real estate." A few people still go to Second Life, apparently, but no one really wants it and there's no money to be made with it now that Casinos and sports gambling are everywhere.

    As a
    • Tech rule #1: The first use of any new collaborative technology will be the distribution of dick pics. Every. Single. Time! Cat pics come second.
  • I can get that you might spend 100 million on a metaverse app. Go on, add a billion for, erm, marketing 'n shit, so people can try it out and you can see if they like it.

    But to just plod away and spend SEVENTY BILLION ?!

  • VRChat is everything Metaverse was trying to be, and is wildly successful. It succeeds because it is directly created through user demand, rather than a top down approach that considers users as a necessary evil at best, or a product to be actively sold at worse.

  • Explain to me again why you renamed the company "Meta"... this should be HILARIOUS!
  • This is what happens when everyone is drinking the same koolaid, not sure if their AI venture will suffer a similar fate, but I think most people at Meta are just happy to be there and aren't really motivated to do anything other than keep their jobs

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