Meta issued a full-throated defense of its metaverse spending, saying it still 'believes in the future' and won't bow to 'short-term thinking'

• Meta's chief tech officer wrote in a blog post on Monday that the company is committed to the metaverse.
• Meta will continue to invest 20% of its spending on the efforts.

Meta is sticking with the metaverse.

In a blog post on Monday titled "Why we still believe in the future," the company's chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth wrote that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, will continue to invest 20% of its spending in Reality Labs, the division in charge of its virtual-reality efforts, which is integral to its metaverse plans.

"It's a level of investment we believe makes sense for a company committed to staying at the leading edge of one of the most competitive and innovative industries on earth," Bosworth wrote.

Bosworth addressed criticism that the company was diverting attention away from its core platforms like Instagram to focus on the metaverse.

"We continue to direct the majority of our investments toward our family of apps as we believe strength in the core can support an ambitious agenda for the future," he wrote.

The post comes after John Carmack, who was the consulting CTO of Meta's virtual-reality initiative, including its Meta Quest headset, left the company last week. In a letter seen by Insider, Carmack said he "wearied of the fight" with Meta.

"We built something pretty close to the right thing," Carmack said in the note. "The issue is our efficiency."

He added, "I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it."

In the blog post, Bosworth said that the Meta Quest Pro was among the "foundational pieces of technology enabling our vision for the future," and that 2022 will be remembered for getting those technologies "into the hands of developers and users for the first time."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone all in on the metaverse, a concept that describes a form of virtual connectivity, which he sees as the future of the internet.

So far, the effort has been hit with reported roadblocks. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Meta's virtual worlds had little engagement and daily active users were below the company's projections.

Meanwhile, Meta has made drastic cutbacks this year ahead of a potential economic downturn, including laying off 11,000 employees last month.

"During boom times, it's easy to make big, ambitious investments in what's coming next," Bosworth wrote in his Monday post. "But when economic conditions turn, it's just as easy to turn the other way: cut back on your ambitions, stick to what's safest and most profitable today, and squeeze as much as you can from it."

He added, "We've all seen the disastrous consequences of this kind of short-term thinking: hollowed out companies that gave up on innovating long ago, content to just turn the crank on an existing business until it stops working."