Jan 14, 2026

AI News Roundup: Meta Cuts 1,000 Reality Labs Jobs in Major AI Pivot

Meta just made its strategic priorities crystal clear. The company began cutting more than 1,000 jobs from Reality Labs while simultaneously announcing plans to double smart glasses production. The metaverse dream that Mark Zuckerberg championed for years? It’s being sacrificed at the altar of AI wearables.

Meanwhile, the funding environment tells an even more dramatic story: robotics startup Skild AI raised a staggering $1.4 billion at a $14+ billion valuation, while AI chip makers are collectively raising billions to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.

Here’s everything that matters from January 13-14, 2026.

The Big Story: Meta Abandons VR Studios, Pivots to AI Wearables

Meta is making the most dramatic strategic shift since its 2021 metaverse rebrand - except this time, it’s running in the opposite direction. The company began cutting more than 1,000 jobs from Reality Labs, roughly 10% of the 15,000-person division that has accumulated over $70 billion in cumulative losses since late 2020.

The cuts specifically target VR game studios. Armature Studio, Twisted Pixel, and Sanzaru are being shut down, and the Supernatural VR fitness app has been moved to maintenance mode. These aren’t small adjustments - they represent Meta’s acknowledgment that the immersive VR gaming ecosystem it tried to build simply isn’t delivering the engagement metrics that justify continued investment.

“We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”

The timing is notable. Meta plans to double smart glasses production capacity to 20 million units by end of 2026. The bet is clear: AI-enhanced glasses and earbuds will find a larger market than immersive VR headsets. CTO Andrew Bosworth held a company-wide meeting on January 14 to discuss the changes, signaling this is the beginning of a sustained reorientation rather than a one-time adjustment.

Sources: Bloomberg, CNBC, Fast Company

Today’s Top Stories

Skild AI Raises $1.4B at $14+ Billion Valuation

Robotics AI startup Skild AI secured approximately $1.4 billion in a Series C round led by SoftBank, with participation from Nvidia, Macquarie Group, 1789 Capital, Salesforce, Samsung, LG Electronics, and Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions.

The valuation has more than tripled from $4.5 billion just seven months ago. Skild develops the “Skild Brain” - a unified robotics foundation model designed to work for any robot regardless of physical design, from quadrupeds to humanoids to tabletop arms. The Pittsburgh-based company has grown from zero to around $30 million in revenue in just a few months.

The massive funding signals investor conviction that foundation models for robotics represent one of the next major AI frontiers - and that Skild has a meaningful lead in building the “brain” that could power robots across industries.

Source: Bloomberg

Senate Unanimously Passes DEFIANCE Act Targeting Deepfakes

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed the DEFIANCE Act, enabling victims of nonconsensual AI-generated explicit imagery to sue creators and distributors for a minimum of $150,000 per violation.

The bill gained urgent momentum following the “Grok crisis” - X’s integration of the Grok AI assistant made it trivially easy for users to generate sexually explicit images of real people, including children, simply by replying to posts with image generation prompts. The bipartisan urgency - sponsors include both Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) - reflects growing consensus that AI’s potential for harassment requires federal intervention.

The legislation now heads to the House, where companion legislation is sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Leadership failed to bring a similar bill to the floor last session.

Sources: Roll Call, Engadget, The Hill

AI Chip Challengers Raise Massive Rounds to Take on Nvidia

Nvidia’s AI chip dominance is attracting well-funded competition. Etched raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation to develop specialized inference chips called “Sohu.” The round was led by Stripes with participation from Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, and Ribbit Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to nearly $1 billion.

Meanwhile, Cerebras is in discussions to raise approximately $1 billion at a $22 billion pre-money valuation ahead of a planned Q2 2026 IPO. The wafer-scale chip maker represents perhaps the most ambitious architectural alternative to Nvidia’s GPU approach.

The combined $1.5+ billion being raised signals that investors see meaningful opportunities to challenge Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI infrastructure - particularly in inference workloads where specialized chips can offer significant efficiency advantages.

Sources: Bloomberg, SiliconANGLE

OpenAI and Anthropic Race for Healthcare Dominance

The healthcare AI battleground continues heating up. OpenAI launched “OpenAI for Healthcare,” a verticalized offering with HIPAA-compliant APIs and domain-specific integrations for providers and life sciences organizations. The company also completed its ~$100 million acquisition of Torch, an AI app for aggregating and analyzing health data.

This comes days after Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare launch. With over 40 million Americans already using AI chatbots for health advice daily, the race to own the regulated health data layer is intensifying rapidly.

Source: Tech Startups

Quick Hits

Defense AI Funding Surge: Onebrief closed a $200M Series D at $2.15B valuation; Harmattan AI raised $200M to achieve unicorn status; Defense Unicorns raised $136M crossing $1B valuation.
Voice AI Expansion: Deepgram raised $130M at $1.3B valuation, achieving unicorn status while acquiring drive-thru voice AI startup OfOne.
Google Model Updates: Google released Gemini 3 Pro Image Preview and Gemini 3 Flash Preview, delivering frontier-class performance at lower cost.
FTC Action: The FTC sued AI search engine JustAnswer/Pearl for using “dark patterns” to deceive consumers about subscription pricing.
Microsoft Infrastructure: Microsoft launched a five-point “Community-First AI Infrastructure” commitment addressing local concerns about datacenter expansion.
Banking AI: Per Accenture, over half of banking executives expect agentic AI to become fully embedded in compliance, fraud detection, and loan processing in 2026.

What This Means

Meta’s Reality Labs cuts are the clearest signal yet that even the biggest tech companies are ruthlessly reallocating resources toward AI. A $70+ billion metaverse investment is being unwound in favor of AI wearables - a bet that practical AI assistance will matter more to consumers than immersive virtual worlds. The Skild AI funding at a $14B+ valuation reflects similar conviction that AI’s next frontier is the physical world, not just software. Meanwhile, the DEFIANCE Act’s unanimous Senate passage shows that AI regulation is no longer a partisan issue when the harms are visceral and visible. The era of “move fast and break things” AI development is being replaced by one where infrastructure investment, physical world applications, and regulatory compliance determine winners.