Meta Platforms Inc. shares climbed after reports that the company is weighing deep reductions to the budget behind its metaverse projects. Investors pushed the stock higher as traders reacted to the possibility that one of the company’s most costly bets could be scaled back.

Metaverse Budget Faces A Major Trim

Based on reports from Bloomberg and Reuters, Meta is considering cuts of up to 30% to the unit that builds its virtual reality and metaverse products, a move tied to planning for the company’s 2026 budget. The change would mainly affect Reality Labs, the division that makes Quest headsets and Horizon virtual spaces.

Reality Labs Has Been Losing Billions

Reality Labs has posted heavy losses since 2020. Reports put the total at more than $60 billion and, by some counts, closer to $70 billion in cumulative losses over recent years. Those sums have kept pressure on management to rethink where the company puts its money.

Investors Reward A Smaller Bet

The market response was swift. Meta’s share price jumped roughly 4%, and some outlets calculated that the move added about $69 billion to the company’s market value as traders reacted positively to a pullback from costly metaverse spending. That reaction signals investors prefer money steered toward projects with clearer near-term returns.

Layoffs Could Follow Early Next Year

Reports have warned that the cuts could bring staff reductions inside Reality Labs, with layoffs possibly starting as early as January 2026. Company leaders reportedly discussed budget scenarios during recent planning meetings. Any job cuts would mark a sharp change after years of heavy investment in virtual reality and related software.

A Bigger Push Toward AI And Wearables

At the same time, Meta has been moving money into artificial intelligence and related hardware. The company finalized a multibillion-dollar deal this year to take a large stake in Scale AI — a pact reported at roughly $14 billion for a near-half ownership — and then hired talent from that startup to help run a new AI effort. That tradeoff shows where Meta’s priorities now lie.

What This Means For Users And Competitors

For people who own or use Meta’s VR gear, this does not mean every project will end. But several initiatives could see slower progress and smaller teams. For rivals and suppliers in the AR/VR space, the cut may reshape who wins short-term device and platform business.

Analysts say the move narrows one major uncertainty for Meta while opening another: how well the company can compete in AI after so many dollars flowed into virtual worlds.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView

Dec. 1–5 recap: This week showed the global scramble to out‑build, out‑train, and out‑ship AI, from datacenter deals to AI-powered smart glasses.

The post Daily Tech Insider Highlights the Escalating AI Arms Race Across Cloud, Code, and Consumer Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.

Dec. 1–5 recap: This week showed the global scramble to out‑build, out‑train, and out‑ship AI, from datacenter deals to AI-powered smart glasses.

The post Daily Tech Insider Highlights the Escalating AI Arms Race Across Cloud, Code, and Consumer Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.

Limitless said it shares Meta's vision of bringing personal superintelligence to everyone.

Meet your new news anchor, Meta AI.

Meta is launching a new unified support hub across Facebook and Instagram designed to make account recovery far less painful.

The post Meta promises it’ll soon be easier to recover your hacked Instagram account appeared first on Digital Trends.

Meta is partnering with CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, Le Monde Group, the People Inc. portfolio of media brands, The Daily Caller, The Washington Examiner, and USA Today.

Alan Dye, the mastermind behind Apple's user interface evolution, officially joined Meta to spearhead a new creative studio within Reality Labs.

The post Meta Poaches Apple Design Legend for AI Future appeared first on TechRepublic.

Alan Dye, the mastermind behind Apple's user interface evolution, officially joined Meta to spearhead a new creative studio within Reality Labs.

The post Meta Poaches Apple Design Legend for AI Future appeared first on TechRepublic.

Meta is scaling back its metaverse spending and redirecting resources toward AI-powered glasses and wearable devices, marking one of the company’s most significant strategic pivots in years.

The shift comes as investor skepticism grows over the long-term commercial viability of virtual worlds and VR headsets, the BBC reported on Friday, citing a company spokesperson.

Meta’s Metaverse Bet Falters as User Growth Stalls

The company has spent more than a decade pouring billions into the metaverse, an initiative that was central to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of computing.

That ambition also led Facebook to rebrand as Meta in 2021, signaling a company-wide commitment to building immersive digital spaces.

However, momentum has stalled. Meta’s flagship VR platform, Horizon Worlds, has struggled to retain users, while sales of the company’s headsets have failed to justify the scale of investment.

Bloomberg reported Thursday that Meta plans to cut metaverse spending by up to 30%, sending shares up more than 3% as markets reacted positively to a potential recalibration.

A spokesperson said the company is not planning “broader changes,” declining to comment on whether the shift could include layoffs across metaverse-focused teams.

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Platforms $META are reportedly expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the metaverse

Executives have reportedly discussed potential budget cuts as high as 30% for the metaverse group next year – Bloomberg pic.twitter.com/PAuEYuMnhN

— Evan (@StockMKTNewz) December 4, 2025

Instead, Meta sees a faster path forward in wearable AI devices, particularly its new line of smart glasses, launched in September to stronger-than-expected demand.

The latest models feature an on-lens display capable of describing real-world surroundings, identifying objects, and translating text.

Analysts view the glasses as one of the first products to successfully blend AI assistance with hardware in a consumer-friendly form, a direction Meta now hopes to accelerate.

The move reflects wider industry trends. Companies across the US and China are racing to bring AI-enabled glasses and compact wearables to market, betting that users will gravitate toward lightweight, always-on assistance rather than immersive VR environments.

Meta Shareholders Reject Call to Add Bitcoin to Company Treasury

In June, Meta investors overwhelmingly shot down a proposal urging the company to explore adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet, according to a May 28 filing.

The measure received just 3.92 million votes in favor, roughly 0.08% of all shares, while nearly 5 billion voted against it.

With CEO Mark Zuckerberg controlling 61% of voting power, the outcome was effectively predetermined.

The proposal came from Bitcoin advocate Ethan Peck, who argued Meta should allocate part of its $72 billion cash pile into BTC as a hedge against inflation and diminishing real returns on cash and bonds.

Peck cited BlackRock’s guidance supporting a small Bitcoin allocation and submitted the proposal on behalf of his family’s Meta holdings.

He serves as Bitcoin director at Strive and has pushed similar campaigns at other tech giants.

The post Meta Cuts Metaverse Spend as It Bets on AI Glasses and Wearables appeared first on Cryptonews.

It appears Meta's Horizon Worlds may literally and figuratively not have legs after all.

— Jordan Arnold is the new director of the Washington State Broadband Office within the Department of Commerce, effective Jan. 2.

Under the Biden administration, Arnold served as a senior policy advisor on the Infrastructure Implementation Team within the Office of the Chief of Staff. Her work focused on helping lead the $65 billion broadband portfolio, which included implementation of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program and other initiatives.

“Jordan has a deep understanding of what it takes to help communities succeed in a digital world,” said Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn in statement. “Her background working at the highest policy levels in the Biden White House will help power Washington forward in our efforts to connect everyone to the internet.”

— Rebecca Lovell has taken the role of interim president and CEO of Greater Seattle Partners (GSP), a regional public-private economic development organization. She has served as chief operating officer of the group for nearly three years.

Lovell’s past roles include CEO of Denali Founder Consulting, executive director of Madrona Venture Group’s Create33, and Seattle’s interim director of Economic Development.

“Rebecca has been a key leader in our organization’s success, and we are delighted to see her at the helm of GSP. She energizes the community, the GSP team and our investors,” said Shane Jones, chair of GSP’s board of directors and a senior vice president at Alaska Airlines, in a statement.

Lovell is succeeding Brian Surratt, who took the presidency in 2022 and was recently appointed deputy mayor of the City of Seattle by Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson.

“We deeply appreciate Brian’s service, commitment and transformational leadership and are excited to see him in this strategic role with the City of Seattle,” Jones said.

Prior to Greater Seattle Partners, Surratt led a community development group, was VP at Alexandria Real Estate and spent 13 years with Seattle’s Economic Development agency, including as director.

— Jason Barnwell, a former Microsoft legal executive, is now chief legal officer for Agiloft, a California company providing software that helps businesses manage their contracts and legal agreements.

“Jason knows how to unlock the potential of legal teams, harness AI and data, and make contracting a true driver of business value,” said Agiloft CEO Eric Laughlin in a statement.

Barnwell was with the tech giant for more 15 years in a variety of legal roles. He left the position of general manager and associate general counsel for Monetization and Business Planning. Barnwell will remain in the Seattle area. On LinkedIn, he thanked his Microsoft colleagues for their support and leadership opportunities, noting that he remains “a cheerleader for Microsoft and its people.”

— Elena Winters has joined Brazil’s Elea Data Centers as vice president of international business. Seattle-based Winters was previously at Meta for more than eight years in infrastructure organization roles focused on data center and site selection. She will remain in Washington, leading Elea’s U.S. and international expansion strategy.

“Now, I’m stepping into a new challenge — gaining experience on the other side of the business, partnering closely with hyperscalers (not working for them!) to help accelerate the growth of AI infrastructure in LATAM,” Winters said on LinkedIn.

— Seattle startup Aarden AI named Michael Gleason as its staff data scientist. The company recently came out of stealth and offers an AI platform that helps landowners research and navigate deals with developers eager to build data centers, clean energy installations, housing and other uses. Gleason most recently worked as a geospatial data scientist at a national laboratory.

Editor’s note: Story updated to include interim CEO for Rebecca Lovell’s new title.

The new support hub will connect users to security tools, account recovery options, and an AI assistant.

The proposal reflects the overall lack of interest in products like Meta's social virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds.

Security and developer teams are scrambling to address a highly critical security flaw in frameworks tied to the popular React JavaScript library. Not only is the vulnerability, which also is in the Next.js framework, easy to exploit, but React is widely used, including in 39% of cloud environments.

The post Dangerous RCE Flaw in React, Next.js Threatens Cloud Environments, Apps appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The European Commission is launching an antitrust investigation into Meta's move to ban other AI companies from using WhatsApp's business tools to offer their own AI chatbots to users.

Dye led Apple's user interface team for the last decade.

Any time a new generation of tech drops, the real value often shows up one step behind it. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Now that the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 models are out, the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1) Wayfarer smart glasses in Shiny Black with clear lenses have dropped to $224.25, down from $299 — […]

The post Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer Gen 1 just got way more tempting now that Gen 2 is out appeared first on Digital Trends.

Researchers from MIT, Northeastern University, and Meta recently released a paper suggesting that large language models (LLMs) similar to those that power ChatGPT may sometimes prioritize sentence structure over meaning when answering questions. The findings reveal a weakness in how these models process instructions that may shed light on why some prompt injection or jailbreaking approaches work, though the researchers caution their analysis of some production models remains speculative since training data details of prominent commercial AI models are not publicly available.

The team, led by Chantal Shaib and Vinith M. Suriyakumar, tested this by asking models questions with preserved grammatical patterns but nonsensical words. For example, when prompted with “Quickly sit Paris clouded?” (mimicking the structure of “Where is Paris located?”), models still answered “France.”

This suggests models absorb both meaning and syntactic patterns, but can overrely on structural shortcuts when they strongly correlate with specific domains in training data, which sometimes allows patterns to override semantic understanding in edge cases. The team plans to present these findings at NeurIPS later this month.

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Peter Schiff has never hidden his distaste for Bitcoin, but his latest comment on X has added a new twist to his long-running feud with the cryptocurrency. The economist, known globally as one of BTC’s most persistent skeptics, admitted that he made a major mistake when he first encountered it more than a decade ago. 

His mistake, however, was not about failing to buy early or doubting a successful technology. Instead, Schiff insisted that his real error was assuming other people would recognize why Bitcoin wouldn’t work. 

Biggest Mistake Was Trusting People To Understand Bitcoin’s Flaws

In his recent tweet, Schiff stated that he initially believed most people would see Bitcoin the same way he did, as a system destined to fail because it is not backed by anything physical and therefore has no real value. He added that the people foolish enough to buy it then are the same people who will refuse to sell even as the market proves him right.

The comment reinforced the core of Schiff’s philosophy: BTC’s worth, in his view, rests entirely on speculation, not fundamentals. According to him, the cryptocurrency’s design means that it cannot function as a reliable store of wealth, medium of exchange, or unit of account.

The post immediately drew many reactions, most of them from Bitcoin supporters who are of the notion that Schiff’s bitterness comes from missing out when Bitcoin traded for less than $1.

Bitcoin believers argued that his supposed mistake wasn’t intellectual but financial. The counterclaim is that Schiff is frustrated because he ignored Bitcoin when it traded for less than a dollar. One reply from BTC advocate Carl Menger captured the mood perfectly. He wrote that Schiff’s real mistake was failing to buy when he first encountered the asset at $1, adding that Schiff is now “an old salty pal yelling at it.” Other commenters also echoed the sentiment.

A Long History Of Harsh Criticism Against BTC

Schiff’s skepticism is not new. Over the years, he has repeatedly maintained that Bitcoin is nothing more than a digital bubble. He has also insisted that BTC lacks any underlying value because it is not tied to a physical commodity, unlike gold. Despite the introduction of Bitcoin ETFs and its growing institutional presence, he maintains that wider adoption does not change what he calls its “fundamental uselessness.”

Bitcoin’s trajectory tells a very different story from the one painted by critics like Schiff. The cryptocurrency has expanded on a scale few assets in modern history can match, reaching levels of global relevance that go far beyond its early niche. 

Its price may be moving through a period without clear bullish momentum, but it still ranks among the largest assets in the world. In fact, BTC now sits as the 9th biggest asset by market capitalization, ahead of companies such as Meta, Saudi Aramco, and Tesla.