Meta CTO Says He And Mark Zuckerberg Are "True Believers" With "Actual Conviction"

Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth says that he and Mark Zuckerberg are "true believers" with "actual conviction".

The quote comes from a recent interview of Bosworth conducted by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While it's ostensibly unclear whether Bosworth is specifically referring to just AR, which he mentions in the quote, the context of the rest of the interview is about the work of Meta's Reality Labs division in general, and he does mention VR earlier in the conversation when asked where he sees digital content in 5 and 10 years.

Well I'll say two things about this, and this is where Mark [Zuckerberg] just deserves so much credit: we're true believers. Like, we have actual conviction.

Mark believes this is the next thing, it needs to happen, and it doesn't happen for free. We can be the ones to do it.

You know, our Chief Scientist Michael Abrash, who's one of my favorite people I've ever gotten the chance to work with, he talks about the myth of technological [inevitability]. It doesn't eventually happen. There's a lot of people in tech who're like "AR will eventually happen". That's not how it fucking works! You have to stop and put the money and the time, and do it. Somebody has to stop and do it. And that is the difference.

The difference between us and anyone else is we believe in this stuff to our cores. This is the most important work I'll ever get the chance to do. This is Xerox PARC level new stuff where we're rethinking how humans are gonna interact with computers. It's J. C. R. Licklider and the human-in-the-loop computing (we're seeing that with AI).

It's a rare moment. It doesn't even happen once a generation. I think it may happen every other generation, every third generation. You don't get a chance to do this all the time.

So we're not missing it. We're gonna do it. And we may fail! It's possible. But we will not fail for lack of effort.

Meta’s XR Revenue Declined Due To Decreased Quest Sales

Meta Reality Labs quarterly revenue declined 6% year-over-year in Q1, and the company says this was “due to lower Meta Quest sales”.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Reality Labs, Meta's "metaverse and wearables" division, has come under constant criticism from some shareholders and analysts because to date it has spent significantly more than it brings in, with some even calling for the division to be shut down. And adding fuel to the fire, in Q1 Reality Labs quarterly revenue was 6% lower than it was in Q1 2024.

Some in the XR industry question how long Meta will put up with these significant losses, concerns that were exacerbated earlier this year when a leaked all-hands memo from Bosworth revealed that he told staff that 2025 would determine whether Reality Labs is "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure".

Bosworth later clarified that Meta would "probably never give up", and essentially suggested that internal memos are rallying cries to staff, akin to a general riling up an army before a battle, rather than literal expressions of a company's exact position. But the decline in Q1 revenue has renewed the discourse around the feasibility of Meta's continuous investment.

“Never Give Up”: Meta CTO Responds To Leaked Memo Discourse

Meta’s CTO has responded to the discourse around his leaked “Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out” memo.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

What truly makes Meta unique among the major consumer tech companies is that the beliefs and convictions of its CEO can be executed unchecked, not that those beliefs and convictions exist in the first place.

Unlike Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Andy Jassy, Mark Zuckerberg owns a controlling stake in Meta, with over 60% of the vote. While those other CEOs can be overruled by shareholders or fired by the board of directors, Mark Zuckerberg effectively cannot be. This unique setup is why Zuckerberg has been able to spend around $100 billion on Reality Labs over the course of a decade, despite the division bringing in less than $15 billion revenue.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly indicated that he sees this spending as long-term investment that he expects to pay off over the course of decades, a timescale most companies do not risk betting on. XR headsets like Quest are still a relatively early technology, far from maturity, and as of 2022 more than 50% of Reality Labs spending was on the research and development of AR glasses, a future product line that hasn't even launched yet.

Bosworth's new comments suggest that the stance of Meta's executives on this hasn't much changed recently, and we recommend listening to the interview to hear his words in the context of the full conversation.