The layoffs have been a long time coming. The Meta Quest 3 VR goggles and controllers are shown sitting on a wooden tabletop with blue walls and a white door in the background. As we expected, Meta has begun laying off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division, which focused on virtual reality and metaverse products, reports . The company will refocus on developing wearables, like its recent batch of AI-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses, according to a memo from CTO Andrew Bosworth. Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021, and while Meta has done a solid job of delivering desirable consumer VR headsets and smart glasses, that business hasn't been nearly profitable enough to justify the cost.

Elon Musk has raided Meta's collection of talented researchers, despite Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offering some a fortune to choose his company instead. The workers were part of Zuckerberg's AI team, helping Meta in the global race to build superintelligence, an almost godlike form of artificial intelligence that could think for itself and be much smarter than any human. Musk himself has gloated about the departures, posting on X that'many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial [compensation].' At least 14 Meta researchers and engineers have left for their new home at Musk's AI competitor since January, while others have fled to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. A spokesperson for Meta told the Daily Mail: 'Some attrition is normal for any organization of this size.'

Meta's chief technology officer has called it "the great honor of my life" to be enlisted in a new US army corps that defence chiefs set up to better integrate military and tech industry expertise, including senior figures from top tech firms that also include Palantir and OpenAI. Andrew Bosworth, a long-term lieutenant to Mark Zuckerberg known widely as "Boz", is one of several senior Silicon Valley executives commissioned to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the corps, called Detachment 201, which the US army says will "fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation". Bosworth, who joined Facebook in 2006, was sworn into the army reserves earlier this month alongside Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, a technology firm with extensive defence contracts, Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI, and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab, a 10bn AI company. They wore military fatigues at the swearing-in ceremony but will not be full-time soldiers. The recruitment is a sign of the increasing importance of technology in modern warfare and growing commercial and research links between some of the largest tech firms and the military.

When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It's very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth's company. But it indeed was true. Boz is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth. The other newly commissioned officers include Kevin Weil, OpenAI's head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of research now advising Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are about to get some powerful upgrades thanks to improvements to the social network's AI assistant. The company is finally adding support for real-time information to the onboard assistant, and it's starting to test new "multimodal" capabilities that allow it to answer questions based on your environment. Up to now, Meta AI had a "knowledge cutoff" of December 2022, so it couldn't answer questions about current events, or things like game scores, traffic conditions or other queries that would be especially useful while on the go. But that's now changing, according to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who said that all Meta smart glasses in the United States will now be able to access real-time info. The change is powered "in part" by Bing, he added.

Meta plans to monetize its proprietary generative AI technology by December, joining Google in exploring practical applications. The company has been investing in AI for over a decade and recently created a new generative AI team to focus on commercialization. Generative AI technology, which can instantly create sentences and graphics, has been commercialized by ChatGPT creator OpenAI. However, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth insists that Meta remains at the cutting edge, with its recently formed generative AI team. Meta aims to use AI to improve ad effectiveness and apply the technology across all its products, including Facebook and Instagram.

According to Facebook-turned-Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the company's metaverse of dead-eyed avatars has been all but abandoned by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- who, in an added blow, is instead said to be spending the bulk of his time chasing the investor-appeasing Silicon Valley squirrel that is generative AI. "We've been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world," Bosworth told Nikkei Asia in an interview on Wednesday. "We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people." "We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy," he added. That sound you just heard in the distance? A single, pixelated tear, hitting the deserted Horizon Worlds' floor.

As enterprises move beyond the pilot stage to scaling and operationalizing artificial intelligence, one tech giant is changing the way its AI operations are organized within the company. Meta (Facebook's parent) announced in early June that it would decentralize AI at the company, distributing ownership of it into Meta's product groups, according to CTO Andrew Bosworth. "We believe that this will accelerate the adoption of important new technology across the company while allowing us to push the envelope," Bosworth wrote in his post announcing the change. The announcement signals a shakeup of how AI is organized at Meta, with the VP of AI Jerome Pesenti leaving the company and other changes such as the consolidation of several separate AI teams. The changes at Meta beg the question for other forward-thinking enterprises across industries: 'Is Meta's AI reorg the example to follow? How should we think about structuring our own artificial intelligence research and operations?' Often, enterprise organizations get their start with AI as an initiative driven by a single business unit.

Meta Platforms Inc., the social media giant's parent company, announced plans last week to go the other way--decentralizing how it develops advanced AI and machine learning tools. In an online post Thursday, Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said the company's previous approach, centered around a handful of stand-alone R&D hubs, made it difficult to integrate new AI capabilities across the business. "In the new model we will distribute the ownership of these AI systems back to Meta's product groups," Mr. Bosworth said. "We believe that this will accelerate the adoption of important new technology across the company while allowing us to continue to push the envelope." The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team.

Facebook's head of hardware on Thursday confirmed a report that the company is "looking at" incorporating facial recognition technology for its upcoming smart glasses devices, but only if people want that feature. Andrew "Boz" Bosworth confirmed the report in a video posted to his Instagram account Thursday evening during a Q&A session with his followers. Asked if "Facebook is considering offering facial recognition on its smart glasses products?," Bosworth said, "We're looking at it." "It's really a debate we need to have with the public," Bosworth added.