It looks like a pivot, or at least a reshuffle, as Meta deals with our ever-changing times.
Meta’s metaverse chief Vishal Shah has been yanked from virtual reality duty and thrust into the company’s do-or-die AI battle, a move that arguably looks like the most dramatic strategic retreat in tech history.
The move, first reported by the Financial Times, hit right after Meta slashed 600 AI jobs last week while rivals like OpenAI hogged the spotlight. Shah now reports directly to Nat Friedman, Meta’s AI product chief, in a role that could determine whether the social media giant rides the AI wave or gets pulled under.
With Meta’s AI division wielding approximately $40 billion in 2025 capital expenditures, the pressure on Shah could not be higher. Recent developments show Meta intensifying its focus on AI, joining rivals such as Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic in a spend-to-win arms race that keeps getting pricier.
It feels like we’ve been here before, as back in April 2023 Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wasn’t abandoning the metaverse, even as the division of the company that manages its virtual and augmented reality projects lost $4 billion in the first quarter. But this 2025.
The mission
Shah’s mission is clear, bridge the gap between Meta’s AI research and products that billions actually adopt. His role will be central to integrating Meta’s AI capabilities into Reality Labs, which now centers on smart glasses rather than virtual worlds.
That shift signals Mark Zuckerberg’s bet that glasses, not VR headsets, will be the main hardware for AI experiences.
Intelligence gathered shows the smart glasses initiative is central to Zuckerberg’s vision for pursuing ‘superintelligence’, a hard left from the metaverse dreams that soaked up so much capital.
The appointment also sends a simpler message, the metaverse was a costly distraction from the real revolution in AI. Does this pivot come too late to catch OpenAI and the rest? That is the trillion-dollar question hanging over Meta’s future.
With Shah’s track record scaling Instagram and wrangling complex product ecosystems, he might be the one who keeps Meta from becoming the cautionary tale of betting on the wrong tech revolution.
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