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I’m Calling It: The Metaverse Is Over
00:20:26
More fallout from the Thinking Machines stuff. I’m officially calling it: I think the Metaverse is over, at least at Meta. Cloudflare continues to make an effort to protect the web and creators from AI strip mining. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions.
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Welcome to the tech brew. Write Home for Friday, January 16, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today, more fallout from the Thinking Machine stuff I'm officially calling it. I think the Metaverse is over, at least at Meta. Cloudflare continues to make an effort to protect the web and creators from AI strip mining and of course, the weekend long range suggestions here's what you missed today. In the world of tech, Attackers don't need exploits when they can use your allowed tools against you. That's why ThreatLocker enforces default deny at execution, stopping unknown software scripts and ransomware the moment it tries to run. No signatures, no guesswork, just control. Threatlocker takes zero trust from theory to practice. By blocking any unauthorized application or behavior from ever running in the first place, generative AI has lowered the barrier to malware creation. So ThreatLocker prevents AI generated polymorphic and fileless attacks by shutting down unknown behavior automatically, even if it's never been seen in the wild. Threat Locker gives you tight control without the noise, meaning fewer alerts and a cleaner, predictable operational posture. Learn more@threatlocker.com TechBrewRideHome that's threatlocker.com TechBrewrideHome Wired continues to be all over this Thinking Machines drama, and they say at least two more Thinking Machines staffers are expected to join OpenAI soon. Some researchers also say they are exhausted by the industry's constant drama, which Tell me about it. Quoting Wired in the aftermath of these events, we've been hearing from several researchers at leading AI labs who say they are exhausted by the constant drama in their industry. This specific incident is reminiscent of OpenAI's brief ouster of Sam Altman in 2023, known inside of OpenAI as the Blip. Murati played a key role in that event as the company's then chief technology officer, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. In the years since Altman's ouster, the drama in the AI industry has continued, with departures of co founders at several major AI labs, including XAI's Igor Babushkin, Safe Superintelligence's Daniel Gross and Meta's Jan LeCun. He did co found Facebook's long standing AI lab affair. After all, some might argue the drama is justified for a nascent industry whose expenditures are contributing to America's GDP growth. Also, if you buy into the idea that one of these researchers might crack a few breakthroughs on the path to AGI, it's probably worth tracking where their going. That said, many researchers started working before ChatGPT's breakout success and appear surprised that their industry is now the source of nearly constant scrutiny. And according to Alex Heath, some of the issues inside of Thinking Machines might be the usual issues that you would normally expect that would lead to people jumping ship. Sources close to Thinking Machines tell me the startup lacks a clear product or business strategy and has been struggling over the last couple of months to raise a new round of financing. After raising a $2 billion seed last year, Mirati has been aiming to increase the company's valuation from $10 billion to about $50 billion. 2025 was a pivotal year for frontier model development, with Google, Anthropic and OpenAI all notching meaningful gains. Meanwhile, Thinking Machines hasn't been training a foundation model, and its only product on the market is still Tynker, an API that simplifies the fine tuning of open source models. Andrew Tullock, another one of the six original co founders of Thinking Machines, also left for Meta in October. Mark Zuckerberg coincidentally approached Maratti about buying the startup earlier in 2020 25, but sources say those talks didn't get far, with Zoth, Metz and Schoenholtz now gone. Selmeth Chintala, one of the co creators of Pytorch, joined Thinking Machines in November and was named its CEO by Murati this week. While the stakes are lower, this week's saga feels eerily similar to when Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI in 2023 and nearly the whole company threatened to quit en masse if he wasn't reinstated. The AI industry is a lot bigger and more influential than it was then, but as this Thinking Machines drama show, companies working on the frontier are still nothing without their people. The dream of the Metaverse continues to die a slow death. Over at the company renamed for it, Meta will discontinue workrooms, its VR space for workers on February 16th. Quest headsets and Horizon services will not be sold to businesses as of February 20th. Quoting the Verge two months before it changed its name to Meta, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his Metaverse for work Horizon workrooms envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate in. Today, the company announced it's shutting down that space. Meta has made the decision to discontinue workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026, reads the note tucked away on a help page. Meta will also no longer sell its headsets and software as a service for businesses, another help page reads. We are stopp sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial skus of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 2026. Meta just laid off roughly 10% of its entire Reality Labs division, over 1,000 jobs. In the aftermath, it's becoming increasingly clear that Zuckerberg has changed his mind about what the word Metaverse actually means. Mobile, yes. Smart glasses, yes. But maybe not VR. First, we learned that Meta's layoffs had completely shuttered three of Meta's hard won VR game studios after previously closing another in 2024. Soon it came out that it's abandoning future development on Supernatural, its standout VR fitness app, and that it has reportedly gutted the studio behind Arkham Shadow as well. What's next? Horizon Worlds? Maybe Meta will draw the line there because it's one of the few VR experiences Meta has made available on mobile phones, too. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth already said the company's Horizon team will double down on bringing the best Horizon experiences and AI creator tools to mobile in a memo obtained by Bloomberg. It stings for true believers in Oculus VR, though, and for those who thought more would come out of Facebook buying up all those VR game studios. But it seems the primary audience for Meta's VR headsets are young teens and kids now, and so perhaps business to business VR isn't where the resources should go. It appears that Meta workrooms will shut down abruptly on February 16, to the point that any data associated with workrooms will be deleted. The company recommends trying Arthur Microsoft Teams and Zoom Workplace instead, and also writes that the Meta Quest remote desktop app will stick around if you want to emulate multiple virtual monitors in your headset. End quote. YouTube is revising its policies to allow full monetization of non graphic videos on sensitive issues including abortion, self harm, suicide and domestic and sexual abuse. Quoting tubefilter the original restrictions on sensitive content were tightly enforced during the 2017 ad pocalypse when advertiser qualms about inappropriate pre roll placements led YouTube to strengthen its grip. In the years since, creators on both sides of the political aisle have complained about perceived censorship on their videos, in particular content related to subjects like LGBTQ rights and guns has been hard to monetize consistently, even in cases where those topics are merely mentioned and are not depicted in a graphic manner. In recent months, however, YouTube's approach to sensitive content has gone through a noticeable evolution. The platform's moderators were reportedly told to ease up on videos that touch on divisive political, social, and cultural issues. And YouTube has also attempted to limit the role automated technology plays in demonetization decisions. In theory, enabling full monetization on a wider range of videos makes it easier for human moderators to effectively enforce platform rules and guidelines. The current state of YouTube ads is relevant to the discussion as well. Some brands have indicated that they're comfortable running ads on videos that could be considered advertiser unfriendly. Recent additions of our Gospel Stats Weekly Brand Report have included more companies with ties to misinformation. For example, MAGA aligned MyPillow sponsored five of the top 1,700 branded YouTube videos of the week. Ultimately, this change isn't really about slackening the rules. It's about shifting responsibility for sensitive content. Another recent YouTube update added more parental controls, including the ability to prevent youth accounts from watching shorts. YouTube still has clear guidelines for what it considers to be ad friendly, but it also wants parents to be the moderators within their families. End quote. It's the holidays, which means you're probably trying to figure out what to get the people in your life who live in back to back meetings. This isn't some sci fi concept. It's Plaud P L A U D. It snaps onto the back of your phone and records phone calls, meetings and conversations. This isn't just note taking, though. It can summarize meetings, generate to do lists, draft emails, extract insights, analyze perspectives and help you make better decisions, all with full contextual awareness across your past conversations and meetings. Black Friday is coming and PLOD is giving tech we write home listeners 20% off. Search Plaudit on Google or Amazon and get 20% off. If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for the conversations world class CEOs have behind closed doors, then you may want to listen to the new podcast Long Strange CEO to CEO. In each episode, Brian Halligan, co founder of HubSpot, speaks with leaders to unpack the real stories behind scaling their companies from the emotional toll of leadership to the tactical decisions that shape a company's future. Expect conversations about hiring, culture, communication strategy and more. Whether you're an aspiring founder, a seasoned CEO, or simply curious about the stories behind the CEOs on the long Strange trip of building enduring legendary companies. This is a show you won't want to miss. Long Strange Trip is available everywhere you get your podcasts. That's Long Strange Trip Podcast again. One of the biggest winners of these early innings of AI has been data marketplaces. Cloudflare is a quite acquiring AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum, aiming to create a new system where AI developers pay creators for training content. Quoting CNBC Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI, cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a release announcing the news. The Internet infrastructure company said the acquisition will help it build tools for AI developers to, quote, find, access and purchase reliable, high quality data through fair and transparent channels. The press release didn't specify the deal's value, and cloudflare spokesperson declined to disclose further details. Prince said the acquisition will help Cloudflare accelerate its development of a new system where AI developers will pay creators for any content they use to train their models. Human Native, a UK startup, manages those transactions. This acquisition is about building the tools needed to protect the longevity of the open Internet, prince said in the release. In August, Prince told CNBC's Mad Money that reshaping content monetization on the Internet is evolving into a new mission for the company as we're helping content creators make sure they can get paid and that the business model of the Web continues to exist and evolve. I think that's going to be the fourth act of Cloudflare, he told Jim Cramer. Last summer, Cloudflare launched its AI Crawl control product, which offers customers a way to restrict and or monetize AI crawlers, a nickname for bots that gather data from across the Web to train large language models on their sites. Cloudflare's cybersecurity products have allowed the stock to benefit from the AI trade, with shares up more than 60% in the last year. End quote. Replit has launched mobile apps on repl.it which enables vibe coding of iOS apps with integrated stripe monetization. Quoting CNBC Artificial intelligence coding startup Replit is now letting users create and publish mobile apps for Apple devices using only natural language prompts, the latest evolution in so called vibe coding. Additionally, repl.it is nearing a new round of funding that would value the startup at $9 billion, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC. The mobile apps on Repplit feature introduced on Thursday allows creators and small business owners to go from idea to working app in minutes and to the App Store in days, the company said in a blog post Thursday, Repl Dot is also integrating the feature with Stripe, enabling users to monetize their apps. The move is a step forward in the AI powered coding space, offering customers a highly accessible use case that goes beyond what bigger players OpenAI, Microsoft and Google currently offer. For example, if a stock trader tells the agent to build an app that tracks the top 10 public companies by market cap, Replit generates the mobile app complete with a functioning interface and gives users a way to preview and test the app. Vibe coding is one of the most pervasive trends to emerge from the generative AI boom, and the momentum has continued to pick up to start 2026. That's largely thanks to Claude Code, a product from Anthropic, which has gone viral in tech circles. In December, Anthropic Tropic announced that Claude Code reached $1 billion in annualized revenue in six months. In September, REPL DOT was valued at about $3 billion in a fundraising round. The hottest company in the space is Cursor Crater Any Sphere, which raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. Lovable, Europe's leading player, was recently valued at $6.6 billion. As more vibe coding products come online, software stocks already beaten down in the AI era could see further erosion. The iShares expanded tech software sector ETF, which Salesforce, Adobe and ServiceNow among its top 10 constituents, has fallen 11% in the last three months as investors grow concerned about the risk from AI agent encoding products. Before publishing a Repl Dot powered app, users have to submit it for review to Apple, which has notoriously strict App Store guidelines and user data agreements. According to Apple, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours. Time for the weekend. Long Read Suggestions first up, Semianalysis has a detailed look at the Apple TSMC relationship. Apple's annual spend at TSMC apparently rose 12x from just $2 billion a year in 2014 to now $24 billion a year in 2025. And Apple once made up 25% of TSMC's total revenue. This interested me because it follows news from earlier this week that Apple now needs to fight for TSMC production capacity amid the whole AI boom. Nvidia was likely TSMC's top customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. By 2020, the partnership had evolved from mutually beneficial to co dependence. Apple could no longer leave. No other foundry on earth could produce M Series and A series chips at the required volume and yield. Samsung's 3 nanometer yields were 30 to 40% versus TSMC's 80%. The switching cost was estimated at $2 to $5 billion in redesign and re qualification alone. TSMC could not lose Apple either. The iPhone brought 20 to 25% of total revenue and filled more than 70% of 3 nanometer capacity. Apple orders were known three years in advance, allowing TSMC to plan CapEx with the confidence of a utility company. A more serious risk was timing. Apple's product cadence is synchronized to TSMC's node roadmap. Moving to intel or Samsung would mean two to three years of inferior products, while yield learning catches up product upgrade cycles. Most importantly, the annual iPhone refresh synced with the holidays would also be at risk End quote then, from the New York Times Scientists say that AI has become a powerful and rapidly improving research tool, and that whether it is generating ideas on its own is, for now at least a moot point. When Dr. Unatmaz uses AI for his research into chronic diseases, he said he often feels like he is talking with an experienced colleague, but he acknowledges the machine cannot do its work without a human collaborator. An experienced researcher is still needed to repeatedly prompt the system, explain what it should be looking for, and ultimately separate the interesting information from everything else the system produces. I am still relevant, maybe even more relevant, he said. You have to have a very deep expertise to appreciate what it's doing. End quote and finally from the verge, a rare 9 out of 10 review John Higgins said the new Sony Bravia 8.2is the best TV on the market for most people. If I were to buy a TV for myself today, the Sony Bravia 8.2is the one I would get. No question. The picture it produces is incredibly engaging and throughout my review process I found myself wanting to watch it more and more, even without the calibration. Sure, there are minor issues with some dark scene, color fringing and it doesn't get as bright as other TVs. A case could be made for the older A95L. If you find it discontinued as out of the box, it will be a little more accurate than the Bravia 8. 2. And for a room that's absolutely bathed in light, the LG G5 offers very similar performance with a brighter image. But during my time spent with the Sony Abravia 8. Two, there was never a moment, be it with critical viewing or watching movie with my family, when I wasn't impressed. It reminded me why I love movies. What more could you ask from a tv? End quote. No bonus content for you this weekend I will talk to you on Monday.