Mark Zuckerberg's once-grand virtual kingdom is looking more like a cul-de-sac these days. Five years after he rechristened Facebook as Meta and declared the "metaverse" as the company's future, Meta is sharply scaling back its virtual reality ambitions and shifting its weight to artificial intelligence. The New York Times reports that Meta has cut about 10% of staff in its metaverse division and is dialing down its Horizon Worlds VR universe, with the company briefly saying this week that VR headset access would end on June 15. A partial reversal followed, with an update from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth noting that certain existing VR apps will live on for the "foreseeable future," per Engadget. It's now just new apps that are off the table.
The company has sunk an estimated $80 billion into the effort, but VR remains a niche, outpaced by other types of digital platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. Quartz notes that Horizon Worlds never had more than a few hundred thousand active monthly users. Now, Zuckerberg is talking up "superintelligence" instead, with Meta planning at least $115 billion in spending this year, largely on AI and the infrastructure to run it, per the Times. Horizon Worlds still exists on phones, and Meta continues to develop headsets and augmented reality glasses, but "metaverse" barely merited a mention at its last developer conference; meanwhile, Zuckerberg said the term "AI" nearly two dozen times. As one metaverse author put it, Meta "glommed onto the term" without learning from earlier virtual worlds.
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