Meta‘s VR arm Reality Labs (formerly known as Oculus) has been having a rough time as of late. Its parent company has reportedly soured on Metaverse and laid off 10% of Reality Labs staff to spend more money on AI. One of the top AI scientists within Reality Labs is moving on, joining a bank that curiously just lost the man leading its VR initiatives.

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Lambert Mathias announced via LinkedIn that he’s joining JPMorgan in Seattle as a managing director (MD). Rather than virtual reality, he says he’s working on agentic enterprise AI. He spent six years with Reality Labs “building multimodal, egocentric perception systems” using LLMs and AI agents.

Before Meta, Mathais spent eight years with Amazon as a machine learning scientist. He worked in the unit behind its Alexa Echo devices, with a focus on improving its conversational capabilities. This might come in handy; JPMorgan chief data officer Theresa Heitsenrether said last year that junior bankers will soon manage teams of ‘digital colleagues,’ which will be much less lonely if those colleagues can hold a conversation.

Mathias arrives at a particularly interesting time given his VR background; JPMorgan’s global head of immersive technology and spatial computing research, Blair McIntyre, quietly left the bank this month according to his LinkedIn. He worked on augmented reality in addition to VR since 2022, and initially worked under the bank’s quantum guru Marco Pistoia, who left the bank last year. McIntyre continues to work as a professor at Northeastern University, which he joined before coming to JPMorgan.

JPMorgan was one of the banks most enamoured by VR. It was the first major bank to enter the Metaverse, where it opened a virtual lounge, and has previously used VR to train provide immersive training for juniors. McIntyre said the technology could be combined with AI and integrated into the workflow of JPMorgan staff to provide “serendipitous access to information.” 

It’s not clear whether JPMorgan has a replacement lined up for McIntyre, nor whether Mathias will lend his VR-expertise to the division in addition to is agentic AI duties. JPMorgan did not respond to a request for comment.

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