'Drop what you're doing': Meta CTO calls Emergency-style all-hands meeting for reality labs. Here's why

Meta’s Chief Technology Officer and head of Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth, has called an all-hands meeting on January 14, describing it as the "most important" of the year, Business Insider reported. Bosworth is urging Reality Labs employees to attend the meeting in person, according to two Meta staffers cited by the outlet.

The push for in-person attendance is unusual for the division, which oversees Meta’s wearables, virtual and augmented reality projects, and its early-stage robotics unit. One employee said some managers told staff to "drop what they're doing" to be there.

Reality Labs has had some successes, including the Ray-Ban smart glasses, but the division has also been costly, losing more than $70 billion since 2020.

Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shifted the company’s focus from the metaverse to artificial intelligence. In 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang. The company also launched a major hiring spree, bringing in top AI researchers and engineers from firms such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

Reality Labs has faced repeated cuts over the past year. In December, Business Insider reported that Meta was considering budget reductions of up to 30% and potential job cuts.

In April 2025, Meta laid off staff from Oculus Studios, its in-house gaming unit, and the team behind Supernatural, a VR fitness app acquired for more than $400 million. These moves followed company-wide layoffs in January 2025 that eliminated nearly 4,000 roles, including at least 560 positions within Reality Labs.

In a memo obtained by the outlet last year, Bosworth called 2025 "the most critical" year of his eight-year tenure at Reality Labs. He wrote: "This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure."