Meta plans 10% job cuts in Reality Labs division
Meta is planning to reduce roughly 10 percent of the workforce in its Reality Labs division, which develops products including the metaverse, sources familiar with the discussions said.
The move reflects the company’s shift in focus toward building next-generation artificial intelligence, News.Az reports, citing The New York Times.
Reality Labs, which employs around 15,000 people, could announce the cuts as early as Tuesday. While the layoffs would represent only a small portion of Meta’s total workforce of 78,000, they are expected to disproportionately impact the metaverse unit, including teams working on virtual reality headsets and a VR-based social network.
According to one source, the reductions could ultimately affect more than 10 percent of the Reality Labs division. The individuals providing the information requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the confidential plans.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer who oversees Reality Labs, has called a meeting for Wednesday and has urged staff to attend in person, according to a memo sent to employees last week, which was obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Bosworth said the meeting was the “most important” of the year but did not elaborate.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, asked top executives last year to make cuts to their 2026 budgets while he pours money into A.I. research. As Meta faces competition from companies like OpenAI and Google, Mr. Zuckerberg has increased the budget for TBD Lab, the skunk works unit at Meta that aims to build superintelligence, a godlike A.I. system.
The company also plans to reallocate some of the money from virtual reality products to increase the budget for its wearables division, which builds smart glasses and wristband computing devices.
The layoffs are set to pump the brakes on building virtual reality for the metaverse, Mr. Zuckerberg’s far-flung vision of what social networking could look like in a V.R.-based version of the internet. He has chased that vision since 2014, when he bought Oculus, a virtual reality start-up that became the foundation for Meta’s hardware division. In 2021, Mr. Zuckerberg rebranded the company Meta, officially moving away from its Facebook name.
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