Tech Brew Ride Home - I’m Calling It: The Metaverse Is Over

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Right Home for Friday, January 16th, 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.

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tech brew ride home. Wired continues to be all over this thinking machines drama, and they say at least two more thinking machines staffers are expected to join Open AI 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. Marotti 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 X-AIs, Igor Babushkin, Safe Superintelligences, Daniel Gross, and Meta's Jan Lecun. He did co-found Facebook's longstanding AI Lab fair, 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 they're 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, end quote. 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. Quote, 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 round last year, Maradi 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 Tinker, an API that simplifies the fine-tuning of open source models.

Andrew Tulloch, another one of the six original co-founders of thinking machines, also left for meta in October. Mark Zuckerberg, coincidentally, approached Marotti about buying the startup earlier in 2025, but sources say those talks didn't get far. Zoff, Metz, and Schoenholz now gone. Selmeth Chintala, one of the co-creators of Pai Torch, joined Thinking Machines in November and was named its CEO by Maradi this week. While the stakes are lower, this week's saga feels eerily similar to when Sam Altman was briefly ousted from Open AI 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 shows that companies working on the frontier are still nothing without their people, end quote. 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 stopping sales of Meta Horizon, managed services and commercial skews of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 20, 26. 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 Batman 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 games 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 16th 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 MetaQuest 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 tube filter.

The original restrictions on sensitive content were tightly enforced during the 2017 adpocalypse 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 plus 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 editions 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. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color,

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Again, one of the biggest winners of these early innings of AI has been data marketplaces. Cloudflare is 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 a 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 Kramer. 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 Replit, 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, Replit 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 Replit 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. Repplet 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 like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google currently offer. For instance,

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. Vib 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, a product from Anthropic, which has gone viral in tech circles. In December, Anthropic announced that Claude Code reached $1 billion in annualized revenue in six months. In September, Replet was valued at about $3 billion in a fundraising round. The hottest company in the space is Cursor-Creator, AnySphere, 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 AI shares expanded tech software sector ETF, which counts Salesforce, Adobe, and Service Now. Among its top 10 constituents has fallen 11% in the last three months as investors grow concerned about the risk from AI agent and coding products. Before publishing a replet 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, end quote.

Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, semi-analysis has a detailed look at the Apple TSM 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 TSM'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 TSM's top customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. By 2020, the partnership had evolved from mutually beneficial to codependence. 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 three nanometer yields were 30 to 40 percent versus TSM's 80 percent. The switching costs was estimated at $2 to $5 billion in redesign and re-qualification alone. TSM could not lose Apple either. The iPhone brought 20 to 25 percent of total revenue and filled more than 70 percent of three nanometer capacity. Apple orders were known three years in advance, allowing TSM to plan CAPEX with the confidence of a utility company. A more serious risk was timing. Apple's product cadence is synchronized to TSM'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. Quote, when Dr. Unut-Maz 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 nine out of ten review, John Higgins said the new Sony Bravia 8-2 is the best TV on the market for most people. Quote, if I were to buy a TV for myself today, the Sony Bravia 8-2 is 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 A-95L, 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 LGG-5 offers very similar performance with a brighter image. But during my time spent with the Sony Abravia 8-2, there was never a moment, be it with critical viewing or watching a movie with my family, when I wasn't impressed. It reminded me why I love movies.

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