On Meta’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CFO Susan Li said the quiet part out loud. “We recently shared internally that we plan to reduce the size of our employee base in May. We believe a leaner operating model will allow us to move more quickly while also helping to offset the substantial investments we are ... Mark Zuckerberg Just Told 8,000 Employees Their Layoffs Are a Line Item in His $145 Billion AI Bill
I’d kind of expect more than that.
Meta’s said that they’re going to to be shifting focus from VR to AI.
It looks like Meta’s VR wing employs 15,000 people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
Though…hmm. It says that there are some AI things under that as well, so maybe that’s not all VR:
WTF are they doing with fifteen thousand employees?
I have a Quest headset, and I have no idea. But of course I don’t want anything to do wih their “metaverse”, so I would’t be able to see where most of their work went.
What I can tell you is the parts I did use, like the system UI and app store, are complete shit and never improved one bit through the years.
The app store is especially terrible for a company with those resources. It’s using the worst machine translation I ever saw (forget LLMs, this is a lot worse than 2010 google translate). It has terrible search and discoverability options for a store that has comparatively so little content.
Whenever I find something interesting in it, it’s also regularly failing transactions with a major bank in my country. I’m almost listing that as a pro since it discouraged me to get stuff from a headset-locked store that will be completely abandoned very soon.
Given that the Metaverse stuff hasn’t been commercially successful thus far, burning a lot of money.