I’m Calling It: The Metaverse Is Over

The world moves fast. Your workday, even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data, Microsoft three sixty five Copilot is your AI assistant for work, built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft three sixty five apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize, so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at microsoft.com/m365copilot. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Friday, 01/16/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, more fallout from the thinking machine stuff. I'm officially calling it. I think the metaverse is over at least at meta. Cloudflare continues to make an effort to protect the web and creators from AI strip mining and of course, the weekend long range suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Attackers don't need exploits when they can use your allowed tools against you. That's why ThreatLocker enforces default deny at execution, stopping unknown software scripts and ransomware the moment it tries to run. No signatures, no guesswork, just control. ThreatLocker takes zero trust from theory to practice by blocking any unauthorized application or behavior from ever running in the first place. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to malware creation, so ThreatLocker prevents AI generated polymorphic and file list attacks by shutting down unknown behavior automatically even if it's never been seen in the wild. ThreatLocker gives you tight control without the noise, meaning fewer alerts and a cleaner predictable operational posture. Learn more at threatlocker.com/techbrew ride home. That's threatlocker.com/techbrew ride home. Wired continues to be all over this Thinking Machines drama, and they say at least two more Thinking Machine staffers are expected to join OpenAI soon. Some researchers also say they are exhausted by the industry's constant drama, which tell me about it, quoting Wired. In the aftermath of these events, we've been hearing from several researchers at leading AI labs who say they are exhausted by the constant drama in their industry. This specific incident is reminiscent of OpenAI's brief ouster of Sam Altman in 2023, known inside of OpenAI as the blip. Maratti played a key role in that event as the company's then chief technology officer according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. In the years since Altman's ouster, the drama in the AI industry has continued with departures of cofounders at at several major AI labs, including XAI's Igor Babushkin, Safe Superintelligences, Daniel Gross, and Meta's Jan Lacun. He did cofound Facebook's long standing AI Lab FAIR after all. Some might argue the drama is justified for a nascent industry whose expenditures are contributing to America's GDP growth. Also, if you buy into the idea that one of these researchers might crack a few breakthroughs on the path to AGI, it's probably worth tracking where they're going. That said, many researchers started working before ChattGPT's breakout success and appear surprised that their industry is now the source of nearly constant scrutiny, end quote. And according to Alex Heath, some …