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Meta’s Chief Expertise Officer and head of Actuality Labs, Andrew Bosworth, has referred to as an all-hands assembly for January 14, describing it because the “most essential” of the 12 months.
Bosworth can be strongly recommending that Actuality Labs staff attend the division’s assembly in individual, two Meta staff advised Enterprise Insider.
The emphasis on in-person attendance is uncommon for the division, which oversees the corporate’s wearables, digital and augmented actuality initiatives, and a nascent robotics unit, these staff stated. Some managers have advised staff to “drop what they’re doing” to attend the all-hands in individual, one worker advised Enterprise Insider.
Meta didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark concerning the assembly.
Whereas the division has seen some success, similar to its Ray-Ban good glasses, Actuality Labs has been a expensive enterprise for Meta, incurring losses of greater than $70 billion since 2020.
Final 12 months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shifted the corporate’s strategic focus towards AI and away from the metaverse. In 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and employed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, as a part of the main reset of the corporate’s AI efforts. Meta then launched into a multibillion-dollar hiring spree, poaching top-tier AI researchers and engineers from rivals similar to OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Actuality Labs has confronted repeated rounds of cuts over the previous 12 months. In December, Enterprise Insider reported that Meta was planning price range cuts as much as 30% and contemplating job cuts in Actuality Labs.
Final April, Meta laid off staff in Oculus Studios, its in-house gaming division, and the crew behind Supernatural, the VR health app Meta acquired for over $400 million. These cuts adopted Meta’s broader January 2025 layoffs that eradicated almost 4,000 roles companywide, with at the least 560 affecting Actuality Labs staff.
In a memo obtained by Enterprise Insider earlier final 12 months, Bosworth referred to 2025 as “probably the most vital” 12 months in his eight-year tenure at Actuality Labs.
“This 12 months doubtless determines whether or not this complete effort will go down because the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure,” he wrote.
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