The Fund for Digital Initiatives of the Eurasian Development Bank has signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of AI and Digitalization. The agreement was signed during the Digital Qazaqstan forum held on 27 March in Shymkent.
According to the text provided, the memorandum outlines a strategic partnership to introduce AI technologies and support digital projects. Areas of cooperation include identifying and implementing joint AI projects, exchanging expertise, and strengthening both sides’ capacities as centres of AI competence.
The announcement says the agreement is intended to deepen the partnership and support Kazakhstan’s strategic objectives for AI development. It also links the memorandum to wider efforts to expand cooperation between the bank’s digital initiatives fund and the ministry.
During the forum, Vice Chairman of the Management Board, Tigran Sargsyan, held a working meeting with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of AI and Digitalization, Zhaslan Madiyev. The discussion covered prospects for broader cooperation, priority projects, and tools to support AI adoption in key sectors of Kazakhstan’s economy.
The text also says Sargsyan described 2025 as a record year for the bank in Kazakhstan, with the most projects implemented in digital public administration, platform solutions, and AI deployment. Madiyev, in turn, proposed creating a registry of Kazakhstan’s open-source e-government component solutions for possible replication across EDB member states.
The announcement presents the memorandum as part of the Eurasian Development Bank’s broader support for digital transformation and AI development across its member states.
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The United Nations Global Mechanism on developments in the field of ICTs in the context of international security and advancing responsible state behaviour in the use of ICTs held its third organisational meeting, focusing on operational arrangements for the newly established permanent forum.
The session, chaired by Ambassador Egriselda López of El Salvador, addressed decision-making procedures, meeting schedules for 2026, and the structure of two dedicated thematic groups (DTGs), which will complement plenary sessions.
Delegations discussed the mechanism’s working methods, with López noting that decisions would be taken by consensus in line with UN General Assembly rules of procedure.
A central point of discussion was the appointment of co-facilitators for the two DTGs, one focusing on ICT security challenges and the other on capacity development. López indicated that she intended to appoint co-facilitators, taking into account geographic balance.
Several delegations, including the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, China, and Belarus, said that such appointments should be agreed upon by consensus among member states. Other delegations, including the European Union, the United States, and Australia, expressed support for the Chair’s approach and emphasised the need to proceed with preparations for substantive work.
Delegations also addressed stakeholder participation, noting that non-governmental organisations, the private sector, and academia would contribute in a consultative manner, while decision-making would remain intergovernmental.
The provisional agenda for future substantive plenary sessions was discussed, with some delegations, including Iran and the Russian Federation, requesting adjustments to ensure alignment with the agreed mandate. Other delegations supported the structure proposed by the Chair, which is organised around the five pillars of the framework for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.
The meeting concluded without agreement on the provisional agenda or the appointment of co-facilitators. The Chair said she would conduct informal consultations with member states to address outstanding issues ahead of the first substantive plenary session scheduled for July 2026.
The Global Mechanism is mandated to advance discussions on threats, norms and principles, the application of international law, confidence-building measures, and capacity development, as part of its role as a permanent UN forum on ICT security.
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Anthropic has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian government to strengthen AI safety research and align with Australia’s National AI Plan. The agreement was formalised during a meeting in Canberra between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The partnership establishes collaboration with Australia’s AI Safety Institute, including the sharing of model capability insights, joint safety evaluations and coordinated research with academic institutions.
The agreement also covers the exchange of Anthropic’s Economic Index data to help track AI adoption and its impact across key sectors such as healthcare, agriculture and financial services.
As part of its wider commitment, Anthropic is investing AUD$3 million in API credits for Australian research institutions, supporting projects in genomics, disease diagnosis and medical innovation.
Universities and institutes will apply Claude to areas such as rare disease analysis, precision medicine and scientific training for future developers.
Further initiatives include startup support programmes and exploration of infrastructure investments in Australia, including data centres and energy systems. The collaboration marks an expansion of Anthropic’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with a Sydney office planned in the near future.
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In 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Horizon, a VR social experience that allows users to interact, create custom avatars, and design virtual spaces. Zuckerberg saw the platform, later renamed Horizon Worlds, as the beginning of a new era of VR social networks, with users trading face-to-face interactions for digital ones.
To show his confidence in VR, Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook Inc. as Meta Platforms Inc. in October 2021, illustrating the company’s shift toward the metaverse as a broad virtual environment intended to integrate social interaction, work, commerce, and entertainment. Building on this new vision, Meta’s ambitions expanded beyond social interaction and entertainment, with the development roadmap including virtual real estate purchases and collaboration in virtual co-working spaces.
Fast forward to 17 March 2026, and the scale of Meta’s retreat from the metaverse vision has become unmistakable. In an official update, the company said it was ‘separating’ VR from Horizon so that each platform could grow with greater focus, while also making Horizon Worlds a mobile-only experience. Under the plan, Horizon Worlds and Events would disappear from the Quest Store by 31 March 2026, several flagship worlds would no longer be available in VR, and the Horizon Worlds app itself would be removed from Quest on 15 June 2026, ending VR access to Worlds altogether.
Yet Meta soon reversed part of the decision. In an Instagram Stories Q&A, CTO Andrew Bosworth said Horizon Worlds would remain available in VR after user backlash. Even so, the greater shift remained unchanged: Horizon Worlds was no longer a flagship VR project, but a much narrower product that reflected a clear contraction of Meta’s original metaverse ambition.
As it stands, Meta’s USD 80 billion investment seems less like a gateway to a new socio-technological era and more like one of the most expensive strategic miscalculations of the 21st century. The sunsetting of Horizon Worlds was certainly not a decision made on a whim, which begs the question: Why did the metaverse fail in the first place? Does it have a future in the AI landscape, and what does its retreat say about the politics of designing the future through corporate platforms?
Metaverse’s mainstream collapse
The most obvious reason for the metaverse’s failure was that it never became a mainstream social space. Meta’s strategy rested on the belief that large numbers of people would start using immersive virtual worlds as a normal setting for interaction, entertainment, and creative activity. The shift never happened at the scale needed to sustain the company’s ambitions.
One reason was friction. VR headsets were less practical than phones, more isolating than social media, and harder to integrate into everyday routines than the platforms people already used to communicate. Entering the virtual world required extra time, extra hardware, and openness to adapt to a different social environment. Most digital habits, however, are built around speed, familiarity, and ease of access.
Meta’s own March 2026 decision makes that failure difficult to deny. A company still convinced that immersive social VR was on its way to becoming mainstream would not have moved Horizon Worlds away from Quest and towards mobile. The shift suggested that the metaverse had failed to move from technological promise to everyday social practice.
Metaverse’s failure was not just one of convenience. It also struggled because it was never presented simply as a new digital space. It was framed as a future built largely on Meta’s own terms, with access tied to the company’s hardware, platforms, rules, and wider ecosystem. Such decisions made the metaverse feel less like an open evolution of the internet and more like a tightly managed corporate environment.
The distinction mattered because Meta was not merely launching another product. It was promoting a vision of how people might one day work, socialise, shop, and create online. Yet the more expansive that vision became, the more obvious it was that the system behind it remained closed and centralised. A future digital environment is harder to embrace when a single company controls the devices, spaces, distribution, and boundaries of participation.
Meta’s handling of Horizon Worlds clearly exposed that tension. The company could remove features, reshape access, alter incentives, and redirect the platform from the top down. Such a level of control may be standard for a private platform, but it sits uneasily with claims about building the next phase of digital life. In that sense, the metaverse failed not only because people were unconvinced by VR, but because its version of the future felt too corporate, too enclosed, and too disconnected from the openness people still associate with the internet.
Metaverse’s economic contradiction
The metaverse did not fail only as a social project. It also became increasingly difficult to justify on economic grounds. Meta spent heavily on Reality Labs while generating only limited returns from those investments. In its 2025 annual filing, the company said Reality Labs had reduced overall operating profit by around USD 19.19 billion for the year, while warning that similar losses would continue into 2026.
Losses on that scale might still have been acceptable if the metaverse had shown clear signs of momentum. However, there was little evidence of mass adoption, strong retention, or a durable path to monetisation. Virtual land, digital goods, branded experiences, and immersive workspaces never developed into the economic base of a new internet layer.
Instead, the metaverse began to look less like a future growth engine and more like a costly experiment with uncertain returns. The gap between spending and payoff became harder to ignore, especially as Meta continued to frame the metaverse as a long-term strategic priority. What used to be sold as the company’s next major frontier was increasingly difficult to justify in commercial terms.
The broader strategic context also changed. Meta’s own forward-looking statements pointed to increased hiring and spending in 2026, especially in AI. In practice, this meant the company was no longer choosing between the metaverse and inactivity, but between two competing visions of the future. AI was already delivering tangible gains in product development, infrastructure, and investor confidence.
In that competition for attention and capital, the metaverse lost. Meta’s pullback was also not an isolated case. Microsoft moved away from metaverse-first ambitions as well, retiring the Immersive space (3D) view in Teams meetings, Microsoft Mesh on the web, and Mesh apps for PC and Quest in December 2025. The services were replaced by immersive events in Teams, a narrower offering built around specific workplace functions rather than a broad metaverse vision.
The wider retreat matters because it suggests the problem was not limited to Meta’s execution. Another major tech company also stepped back from standalone immersive environments and turned to more limited, use-specific tools instead. A larger pattern appeared from that shift: grand metaverse narratives gave way to practical features, embedded tools, and industry-specific uses. In that sense, the metaverse has not entirely disappeared, but it did lose its status as the next internet.
Metaverse’s afterlife in the age of AI
The metaverse’s decline does not necessarily imply a complete disappearance. What seems more likely is that parts of it will survive in altered form, detached from the sweeping vision that once surrounded it. Rather than continuing as a standalone digital world meant to transform social life, the metaverse may persist as a set of tools, features, and immersive functions folded into other technologies.
AI is likely to play a role in that transition. It can lower the cost of building virtual environments, speed up avatar creation, automate elements of interaction design, and make digital spaces more responsive. In this sense, AI may succeed where the original metaverse struggled, not by reviving the same vision, but by making parts of it more practical and easier to use.
Such a distinction is important because it shifts the focus from ideology to utility. The metaverse was once marketed as the next stage of the internet, yet its more durable applications now appear to lie in narrower settings where immersion serves a clear purpose. Training, design, simulation, and industrial planning are all contexts in which virtual environments can offer measurable value without becoming a universal social destination.
What might survive, then, is not the metaverse as it was originally imagined, but a smaller set of immersive capabilities embedded in gaming, education, industry, and workplace systems. Avatars, digital agents, simulations, and adaptive virtual spaces may all remain relevant, but as components rather than the foundation of a new social order.
The shift also helps explain the political lesson of the metaverse’s collapse. Large-scale investment, aggressive branding, and executive certainty were not enough to secure public legitimacy. Meta tried to present the metaverse as an inevitable horizon, yet users did not embrace it, markets did not reward it in proportion to the spending, and the company itself eventually narrowed the project it had once elevated into a corporate identity.
In that sense, the metaverse matters even in failure. Its retreat does not simply mark the end of an overhyped product cycle. It also reveals the limits of top-down corporate future-making, especially when private platforms try to define the direction of collective digital life before society has decided whether such a future is either desirable or necessary.
Conclusion
The metaverse failed because it asked too much of users, promised too much to investors, and concentrated too much power in a platform model that never convincingly earned public trust. Meta’s retreat from Horizon Worlds makes that failure difficult to ignore, while Microsoft’s parallel narrowing of immersive ambitions suggests the problem extended beyond one company’s misjudgement.
Immersive VR technologies are unlikely to vanish, and AI may even extend some of their useful applications. Yet the metaverse as a universal social future has largely collapsed under the combined weight of weak adoption, unsustainable economics, and an overly corporate vision of digital life. What remains is not the next internet, but a reminder that the future cannot simply be declared into existence by the companies most eager to own it.
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The programme, titled ‘AI Works for Britain’, seeks to address structural barriers that limit professional mobility despite widespread access to digital tools.
New research indicates that a significant proportion of the population feels unable to advance, citing gaps in skills, confidence and professional networks.
While a majority already use AI tools, only a minority report meaningful productivity gains, suggesting that effective utilisation remains uneven across the workforce.
An initiative by Google that focuses on practical upskilling through public training hubs, university partnerships and community outreach programmes.
These efforts aim to move users beyond basic interaction with AI tools toward more advanced applications that can enhance employability, efficiency and business development.
The programme in the UK aligns with broader efforts to position AI as a driver of economic inclusion rather than a source of inequality, with policymakers and industry stakeholders emphasising the importance of workforce readiness in an increasingly AI-driven economy.
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The University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group have launched a four-year research partnership to study how agentic AI tools could support software and data engineering work.
According to the announcement, engineers at Lloyds Banking Group in Bristol, Manchester, and Hyderabad will work with large-language-model-based coding tools on different tasks each quarter. The aim is to measure effects on delivery speed and quality.
The collaboration will also create a PhD position, a Master of Research position, and a postdoctoral research associate post at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Tim Storer said: ‘Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work.’
However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations.’
We’re delighted to be partnering with Lloyds Banking Group on this groundbreaking project. Together, we will enable the Group’s plans to increase their software development capacity, produce high-quality research for the benefit of all, and influence national policy and industry standards.’
Dr Shane Montague said: ‘Lloyds Banking Group’s mission to Help Britain Prosper means leading innovation that genuinely improves how engineering gets done, with a focus on delivering enhanced digital services for our customers.’
‘We’re excited to partner with the University of Glasgow to gather rigorous, real-world evidence from day-to-day engineering work, so we can understand what really works and how agentic AI can be applied effectively and responsibly at scale.’
The partners say they plan to publish regular research papers and best-practice documents as the project develops.
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Digital infrastructure remains central to modern society, with mobile networks forming the backbone of global connectivity and technological progress. Research efforts are increasingly focused on ensuring that today’s 5G systems evolve into more advanced and intelligent network platforms.
The future 6G era is expected to go beyond traditional connectivity, enabling immersive communication experiences, intelligent machine interaction, and the development of large-scale digital twins.
Networks are anticipated to become cognitive systems, capable of learning, adapting, and making autonomous decisions in real time.
Alongside new capabilities, future networks will further strengthen core requirements such as security, privacy, reliability, and resilience. Advanced distributed processing will be embedded across network architecture to support real-time operations and system stability at scale.
The 6G vision is aligned with the 2030 timeframe, with development built on open and standardised ecosystems that encourage global collaboration. Interoperability will remain central, supporting innovation and universal connectivity across devices and services.
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Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has released an update on rules requiring platforms to prevent users under 16 from holding accounts. Early results show significant action by companies, but also ongoing challenges in fully enforcing the restrictions.
By mid-December 2025, around 4.7 million accounts were removed or restricted, with more than 300,000 additional accounts blocked by March 2026. Despite these reductions, many children continue to retain accounts, create new ones, or pass age assurance checks.
Regulators identified several compliance concerns, including platforms that allow repeated attempts at age verification and encourage some users to update their ages. Reporting systems for underage accounts were often difficult to access, particularly for parents.
Investigations into five major platforms are ongoing to determine whether they have taken reasonable steps to meet their legal obligations. Authorities are assessing systems and processes rather than individual accounts, with enforcement decisions expected by mid-2026.
A new legislative rule introduced in March 2026 targets platform features linked to potential harm, such as recommender systems and continuous content feeds. Regulators will continue working with industry while gathering evidence and maintaining transparency during the enforcement process.
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The World Data Organisation was formally established in Beijing on 30 March 2026, as the first professional international body focused on global data development and governance. The organisation aims to operate as a non-governmental, non-profit platform for dialogue, rule-making, and international collaboration.
The WDO has three stated goals: bridging the data divide, unlocking data’s value, and powering the digital economy. These priorities are intended to reduce disparities in digital capacity between developed and developing countries.
Global data use has become central to addressing challenges such as poverty reduction, public health, climate change, and AI development. Disparities persist, with digitally deliverable services accounting for over 60% of service exports in advanced economies but only 15% in least developed countries.
China’s digital infrastructure has advanced rapidly, with 4.8 million 5G base stations built by the end of 2025, and computing power ranked second globally. Officials said platforms like the WDO and UN will help shape international data governance, promote cooperation, and support secure cross-border data flows.
The WDO seeks to safeguard countries’ rights to develop data while respecting privacy, security, and enterprise interests. By 2030, it is expected to become a globally influential platform and a trusted hub in international data governance.
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Meta has unveiled its first prescription-optimised AI glasses, expanding its wearable line with Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 models for everyday vision correction. The launch targets users who already rely on prescription eyewear, offering a more integrated and comfortable experience.
The range includes Blayzer Optics and Scriber Optics with adjustable hinges, nose pads, and temple tips for a better fit. Pre-orders begin at $499 in the United States via Meta and Ray-Ban platforms, with wider availability in optical retailers and select global markets from 14 April.
Alongside the hardware launch, Meta is introducing new frame and lens colour combinations across its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta collections.
Additional AI-driven features are also rolling out, including hands-free nutrition tracking, WhatsApp message summaries, and improved on-device recall capabilities designed to enhance everyday communication.
Further software updates extend functionality with discreet handwriting input, in-lens navigation across US cities, and expanded media recording tools. The company positions its AI glasses as a multifunctional platform combining vision correction, connectivity, and real-time assistance.
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