Meta plans to lay off staff members on Wednesday from the department of its custom silicon-making Reality Labs subsidiary that is geared towards the metaverse, according to Reuters.
On Tuesday, a post on the internal discussion board Workplace of Meta alerted staff members of the layoffs. According to the article, they will find out their employment status with the company by early Wednesday morning.
If the cuts are severe, they might interfere with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to develop augmented and virtual reality products that give users access to the “metaverse,” a collection of immersive virtual worlds, especially the AR glasses that, in his words, “will redefine our relationship with technology.”
The FAST division, which employs about 600 people, works on creating specialised chips to provide Meta’s products with the ability to carry out particular functions and run more effectively, setting them apart from rivals joining the nascent AR/VR sector.
Current products from Meta include the Quest line of mixed reality headsets and the EssilorLuxottica and Ray-Ban smart glasses, which can stream video and communicate with users via an AI virtual assistant.
At its annual Connect conference this week, it unveiled new iterations of the smart glasses and its consumer-focused Quest headgear, Quest 3.
Since November of last year, Meta has cut over 21,000 positions in an effort to reassure investors that it is controlling costs in the face of slowing revenue growth, increasing inflation, and worries that Reality Labs is losing too much money.
The majority of this year’s layoffs, according to a statement from Mark Zuckerberg in March, will take place in the spring, but “in a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”
