THE BIG UPDATE
Meta Killed the Metaverse. Here's Where All That Money Went.
After burning through roughly $70 billion building a virtual world almost nobody visited, Meta is pulling the plug on Horizon Worlds — its flagship VR social platform. The app comes off the Quest store at the end of this month and goes dark entirely on June 15th. Reality Labs, the division behind it all, logged a $6 billion operating loss in just the last quarter of 2025 alone.
So where's the money going? AI. Meta just guided for up to $135 billion in capital spending for 2026 — nearly double what it spent last year — with the overwhelming majority earmarked for AI infrastructure: data centers, chips, and the systems that power tools like Meta AI across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has essentially stopped saying the word "metaverse" in public. The pivot is complete.
Here's what's wild: Horizon Worlds never cracked more than a few hundred thousand active users in a month. That's not a niche product — that's a rounding error. Meanwhile, Meta's AI assistant is now baked into apps used by billions of people. The contrast couldn't be starker.
So what? This is a big deal beyond just Meta. It's a signal to every company that bet on VR as "the next platform" that the window has closed — at least for now. The resources, the talent, and the investor patience have all shifted to AI. If your company is still planning a metaverse strategy, it's time to have a very honest conversation.
I've always had FOMO for not getting a Meta Quest headset. May have been for the best looking back... I'm still in the Meta AI ecosystem though. I've been rocking their Ray-Ban glasses. You win some, you lose some.
QUICK COMMITS Small updates worth knowing.
Amazon Is Pulling 2/3 of Its Packages from the Post Office
After contract talks collapsed — Amazon says USPS "walked away at the eleventh hour" — Amazon plans to cut at least two-thirds of the packages it routes through the postal service by September. Last year, USPS delivered over a billion Amazon packages. Losing that volume could be devastating for an agency that already posted a $9 billion net loss in fiscal 2025. The post office as we know it is quietly becoming a question mark.
Uber Just Bet $1.25 Billion on Self-Driving Rivian SUVs
Uber is investing up to $1.25 billion in Rivian to deploy 50,000 autonomous robotaxis — fully self-driving electric SUVs — across 25 cities by 2028, starting with San Francisco and Miami. The vehicles will use Rivian's R2 electric SUV running on its own autonomy platform. Robotaxis aren't science fiction anymore; they're on a delivery schedule.
OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Is Out and It's Aiming at Your Work
OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 on March 5th — its most powerful model yet for professional tasks. It can control your desktop, navigate browsers, work through spreadsheets and presentations autonomously, and reason out loud while working so you can course-correct mid-task. It's less of a chatbot at this point and more of a junior colleague who never sleeps. The API supports context windows of up to 1 million tokens, which is enormous — basically, feed it an entire company document library and it can work across all of it at once.
THE TOOL DROP One tool worth knowing this week.
Gemini App Actions (Google, Pixel 10)
Google quietly shipped something genuinely useful in its March Pixel update: Gemini can now do things inside your apps for you. Tell it "order my weekly groceries" and it opens DoorDash or Instacart, loads your saved list, and places the order — it just asks you to confirm the total before it submits. Same goes for booking a ride, ordering food, or managing your smart home. It works across Uber, Lyft, UberEats, GrubHub, DoorDash, and Starbucks. Right now it's limited to Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S26 in the US and South Korea, but the direction is clear: your phone's AI is moving from answering questions to actually handling tasks. That's a meaningful shift in what "assistant" means.
THE SO WHAT
Every story this week points in the same direction: AI isn't something companies are preparing for anymore — it's something they're deploying right now, at scale, inside the apps you already use. Meta, Google, Uber, OpenAI — they've all moved from "exploring AI" to "betting the company on it." The useful question to sit with this week: which part of your own workflow could an AI agent handle while you focus on the stuff only you can do?