Meta's CTO: The competition is coming for us in AR/VR

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth penned a year-end post about the company’s AR/VR efforts this week that doubled as a kind of rallying cry for Meta employees, with Bosworth declaring that “the coming year will be the most important one in the history of Reality Labs.”

I caught up with Bosworth after the post went live, and asked him if he thought 2025 would be a kind of make-it-or-break-it year for Meta in AR and VR. “I don’t know about breaking it,” he retorted, while acknowledging that the stakes are high. “We are leading in these spaces, and the competition is coming for us.”

“I did bring that message to my team: There’s real stakes now,” Bosworth added, “If we slip, then we potentially lose our leadership position.”

Meta’s newly-arrived competition includes Apple with its Vision Pro headset, as well as Google with its recent Android XR announcement. “Up until now, we were a little bit on our own,” Bosworth said. “We were having to advance the state of the art across every single part of our portfolio.” Now, others are swooping in, and benefitting from some of the work that Meta has done in the past. “Competition always has an easier time than the leaders,”  he said. “The leader is pathfinding, and it’s expensive. The competition is just following what the leader does.”