Meta reportedly cuts around 1,500 VR and AR jobs amid renewed push to become an AI juggernaut

According to a New York Times article from anonymous sourceAs of Tuesday, Meta will announce that about 10% of workers in the company’s Reality Labs division will lose their jobs, or about 1,500 people in a division of about 15,000 people.

Reality Labs was formerly Oculus, the VR headset company founded by Palmer Luckey, originally funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Since its acquisition in 2014 by what was then called Facebook, Oculus has evolved towards Meta’s division focused on “virtual and augmented reality”. It manufactures helmets and Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses as well as VR and AR software, including social networking platform Horizon Worlds – what’s left of it, anyway.

The Times reports that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth called a meeting of Reality Labs staff members on Wednesday, which he called the “most important” meeting of the year, and said employees are expected to attend in person. At first glance, this meeting will take place the day after the official publication of the dismissal plan.

My Gizmodo colleague James Pero strongly hinted last month that something like this was going to happennoting that a planned 30% budget cut at Reality Labs was, if not the death knell for Meta’s metaverse project, at least a clear shift in priorities toward AI.

And indeed, on Monday, Meta announced a massive data center capacity expansion plan called Meta Compute, aims to build “tens of gigawatts” of AI computing before the end of the 2020s. Computing capacity is roughly measured in gigawatts, or roughly the power consumption of a major U.S. city. So Meta’s rather vague “tens of gigawatts” computational projection translates to “enough data centers to use the equivalent of ten San Franciscos in electricity, but less than a hundred San Franciscos.”

Also on Monday, Meta announced something that will certainly help iron out the friction involved in all this AI data center construction: the hiring of Dina Powell McCormick…a former advisor to Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who also worked as an executive in the banking industry, to become Meta’s new president and vice president.

“How we design, invest and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement.

Zuckerberg also used the term “strategic advantage” in 2022 to explain its push for more metaverse-related technology. “Enabling more experiments is actually the main driver, and then the kind of hardening against external risks is certainly a long-term strategic advantage,” he said at the time.