Meta has laid off an unknown number of Reality Labs employees.
As reported by The Verge, the Facebook and Meta Quest owner is currently restructuring Reality Labs into two groups: a ‘Metaverse’ organization that includes its Quest business and a ‘Wearables’ group that will house other hardware initiatives.
The company has made some employees redundant as part of that restructure. The Verge claims a “relatively small number” of staffers were laid off, including some leaders within Reality Labs. Meta has laid off more than 20,000 workers since November 2022.
An internal memo sent out by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth (reprinted by The Verge) claims the shake-up will enable Meta to create a “more integrated product experiences across hardware, software, and experiences with less friction and fragmentation.”
“With Quest 3 bringing MR into the mainstream, we have finally gotten to a place where we feel like all the major components are in place for us to grow our software platform consistently,” wrote Bosworth.
“We’re bringing the team working on MR into the Metaverse product group led by Vishal Shah and realigning the components to be more horizontally aligned instead of vertical. We are deeply committed to investing in Horizon as the core foundation of our social, spatial Horizon OS, and high-quality experiences for both mixed reality and mobile.”
Bosworth also claimed the company’s Ray-Ban Meta glasses have become a “much bigger hit than we anticipated.” He indicated that success, combined with the existing functionalities of Meta AI, have created “a lot more value from the products we are building even before the full AR vision is ready.”
Reality Labs continues to bleed cash. The division lost $3.8 billion during the first quarter of the current fiscal year. It also reported losses of $16.1 billion and $13.7 billion during 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Meta expects those losses to “increase meaningfully” year-over-year due to ongoing product development efforts, but has acknowledged it needs to find a better way of articulating the “value” being generated by the division. It has, however, also stated that if its investments in Reality Labs aren’t successful, its wider business will suffer.
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