In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta. Thatβs how invested Mark Zuckerberg was in the metaverse, a still-to-be-constructed digital world people could immerse themselves in via avatars.
Five years and $80 billion later, Meta is winding down its metaverse. It announced last week it would be shutting down its VR game Horizon Worlds. (It later decided to continue supporting existing games.)
Those who have been reading the tea leaves have seen this coming for a while. Zuckerbergβs commitment to building a metaverse meant he couldnβt go all-in on AI, which took off a year later with the introduction of ChatGPT.
Half measures didnβt work. Metaβs own open-source model, Llama, failed to make the same impact as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude (which launched Dispatch this week); itβs since been put out to pasture.
So the company behind Facebook started pivoting again, spending big on AI talent by poaching from its competitors. Meanwhile, it started pruning the metaverse. It kicked off 2026 by laying off 1,000 people from a metaverse division and shuttering three VR studios.
But it still has some major catching up to do on AI. Last year, it decided to ditch its frontier model, Behemoth, and start over with a closed-source model. Now, that new LLM, Avocado, is being held back after testing showed itβs not ready for primetime.
Thatβs reality for you.