Why Meta did its big metaverse layoffs
News from my Source Live conversation with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth in Davos.
It’s just past midnight here in Davos, Switzerland, where I’ve wrapped my final day of Sources Live interviews. Stand by for full conversations with Demis Hassabis, Reflection AI co-founder Ioannis Antonoglou, Scale AI CEO Jason Droege, ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski, and more in the coming days.
First, 3 things:
On the same day that a new report went deeper on the very messy drama at Thinking Machines, OpenAI announced a reorg putting ex-CTO Barret Zoph in charge of its enterprise business. Vijaye Raji will lead ads.
Anthropic published Claude’s “consitution” and these lines are genuinely trippy: “We don’t fully understand what Claude is or what (if anything) its existence is like… We hope Claude finds in it an articulation of a self worth being.”
The only tech CEO name-checked by President Donald Trump during his appearance on the Davos stage today: Mark Zuckerberg.
“VR is growing less quickly than we hoped”
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says Reality Labs laid off 10% of its workforce because VR headset sales have failed to take off.
“We’re still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we hoped,” Bosworth told me on Wednesday during a Sources Live conversation on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And so you want to make sure that your investment is right-sized.”
