Mark Zuckerberg says Actuality Labs will (finally) cease shedding a lot cash

Mark Zuckerberg says there’s an finish in sight to Actuality Labs’ years of multibillion-dollar losses following the corporate’s layoffs to the metaverse division earlier this 12 months. The CEO mentioned he expects to “regularly scale back” how a lot cash the corporate is shedding because it doubles down on AI glasses and shifts away from digital actuality.

Talking throughout Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings name, Zuckerberg was clear that the modifications will not occur quickly, however sounded optimistic in regards to the division that misplaced greater than $19 billion in 2025 alone. “For Actuality Labs, we’re directing most of our funding in direction of glasses and wearables going ahead, whereas specializing in making Horizon a large success on cellular and making VR a worthwhile ecosystem over the approaching years,” he mentioned. “I anticipate Actuality Labs losses this 12 months to be just like final 12 months, and this can probably be the height, as we begin to regularly scale back our losses going ahead.”

The corporate reduce greater than 1,000 employees from Actuality Labs earlier this month, shut down three VR studios and introduced plans to retire its app for VR conferences. Meta has additionally paused plans for third-party Horizon OS headsets. As a substitute, Meta is doubling down on its sensible glasses and and wearables enterprise, which tie in additional neatly to Zuckerberg’s imaginative and prescient for creating AI “superintelligence.”

Throughout the name, Zuckerberg famous that gross sales of Meta’s sensible glasses “greater than tripled” in 2025, and hinted at greater plans for AR glasses. “They [AI glasses] are going to have the ability to see what you see, hear what you hear, speak to you and provide help to as you go about your day and even present you info or generate customized UI proper there in your imaginative and prescient,” he mentioned.

Zuckerberg has spent the previous few years laying the groundwork for pivoting Meta’s metaverse work into AI. He provided one instance if what the means for Meta’s Horizon app.

“You may think about … individuals having the ability to simply, by a immediate, create a world or create a sport, and have the ability to share that with individuals who they care about. And also you see it in your feed, and you may soar proper into it, and you may have interaction in it. And there are 3D variations of that, and there are 2D variations of that. And Horizon, I feel suits very effectively with the form of immersive 3D model of that.

“However there’s undoubtedly a model of the long run the place, you realize, any video that you simply see, you’ll be able to, like, faucet on and soar into it and, like, have interaction and form of like, expertise it in a extra significant method. And I feel that the investments that we have finished in each quite a lot of the digital actuality software program and Horizon … are literally going to pair effectively with these AI advances to have the ability to deliver a few of these experiences to a whole bunch of tens of millions and billions of individuals by cellular.”

One factor Zuckerberg didn’t point out, although: the phrase “metaverse.”