Meta’s enormous bet on virtual reality ended last week, with the company reportedly laying off roughly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division — about 10% of the unit’s staff — and shutting down several VR game studios, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s a huge reversal for a company that, just four years ago, staked its entire identity on the concept.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/19/well-there-goes-the-metaverse/
The AI giant announced Friday that it will begin testing ads within the Free and Go tiers of ChatGPT in the “coming weeks,” marking a watershed moment for the world’s most popular AI chatbot as it adopts a traditional monetization approach. Ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service tied to the ongoing conversation, the company said in a blog post.
https://www.adweek.com/media/openai-chatgpt-ads-sponsored-products/?itm_source=homepage&itm_medium=post-teaser-center&itm_campaign=1
The union representing employees at the Halifax office of international video game giant Ubisoft has filed a labour board complaint over the Nova Scotia studio’s closure.
The union, CWA Canada, was certified last month to represent 61 of the studio’s 71 workers. Three weeks after certification, the France-based company announced Jan. 7 the Halifax office would be shuttered, citing cost and efficiency concerns.
The union filed its labour board complaint on Tuesday, accusing the company of closing the studio in order to keep out the union, in violation of the Trade Union Act.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/union-files-labour-board-complaint-over-closure-of-ubisoft-s-halifax-studio-9.7044915?cmp=rss
A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country.
https://www.404media.co/police-unmask-millions-of-surveillance-targets-because-of-flock-redaction-error/
After dying a painful death at the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this year. Either way, two QWERTY phone announcements in this still very new year suggest there may be some kind of trend. Maybe after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the mobile experience, it’s time to go back to the physical keyboard and its more tactile typing.
https://gizmodo.com/qwerty-phones-are-really-trying-to-make-a-comeback-this-year-2000709717
Artificial intelligence is saving workers time, but a large share of those gains is being erased by the effort required to fix AI-generated mistakes, according to a new study. “For every 10 hours of efficiency gained through AI, nearly four hours are lost to fixing its output,” the report said. As a result, “productivity gains alone are not translating into better outcomes for most organizations,” it said.
https://qz.com/ai-mistakes-limit-time-savings-workday-finds
The music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it’s banning AI-generated music and audio. “We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans,” the company said. Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” is not permitted, and that it will not allow the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/bandcamp-takes-a-stand-against-ai-music-banning-it-from-the-platform/