Christmas 2025

Merry Christmas, everyone! 'Tis the season to be jolly!

Facebook burned $73 billion and changed its name to "Meta" trying to make virtual reality take off, and its fortunes only recovered after pivoting into the AI boom. 

But as reported by Upload on December 14, 2025, the dream is not dead! Even as talk was rife that the company are considering deep cuts to Meta Reality Labs' VR and metaverse teams.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth (left): "Every now and then there's just a narrative that people cannot help writing, and I'll give you the way to know. First of all, the answer is no: VR is not dead. We're also investing a lot in glasses and AI, and that's the trick. The way to know if there's a convenient narrative is if it appears zero-sum. Meta is a big company. We can invest in many things. We can invest in VR, glasses, and AI – and by the way, we have been for years. Every year we go through a budget process, and in that budget process, we ask every team, "Hey, can you do the same work more effectively?" We've got better tools, we've got AI, we've got things. You're trying to right-size it. How big is the market? How fast is it growing? Is that what we expected? If it's slower than we expected, let's make sure our burn rate is lower. If it's faster than expected, let's double down and make sure we take advantage and don't cede it to other people. You're being smart about it, but it's normal stuff". 

The discussion follows last year's ominous leaked memo titled "2025: The Year of Greatness" from the same source back in November! 

Bosworth had told Reality Labs staff that 2025 will determine whether their projects are "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure". 

In the memo, Bosworth described 2025 as "the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs", and told staff they "need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR". 

Note that at the time, Meta were using MR to refer to VR too, a nomenclature that they ended earlier this year. 

"And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance", Bosworth added. 

As far as I am aware, in no way did that happen!