Mark Zuckerberg cuts VR output as Meta shifts to AI

Meta changed its name from Facebook in 2021 as part of a push to build a business beyond social media and advertising, which had long been its main revenue source. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg told the Meta Connect keynote that he expected the metaverse, the idea of merging the physical and digital worlds, to arrive before advanced AI, and that sophisticated AI would come later. That expectation did not hold: virtual spaces have found users through games and VRChat, but they have not become a mass communication layer in the way mobile networks or the internet itself did.

Zuckerberg told this year's keynote that personal superintelligence arrived first and has proven to be the far larger and more important opportunity, so Meta has shifted its strategy toward building devices best suited to it. He also said Reality Labs is now focused on building great glasses for Muse and AI, and that Meta has decided to reduce its metaverse focus for the time being by making fewer VR devices and releasing them only when a true breakthrough occurs. The newly announced Meta VR Glasses were presented as exactly that: lightweight at 100g and pitched as a refinement of Apple's Vision Pro, about two years after that device reached the market, though not a mass-market product at $1,299.

The stakes hinge on whether Meta can actually convert its early lead in personal AI assistants into a platform business. The company has a 94% share of display-free AI glasses, which supports its aggressive push. But rivals are already moving: SpaceXAI's Grok Bot is available in Japan, Microsoft is expanding a service called Autopilot, and OpenAI is rumored to announce a competing AI assistant at its DevDay 2026 event. How strictly Meta walls off user data through Muse Confidential VM and Private Processing will also matter because the assistant reads email, calendars and financial information — a subject on which Meta, as a social media operator, has carried a poor reputation.