Misleading title, it’s more of a delay according to Facebook’s quote in the article:
“While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain-computer interface] technologies, we’ve decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market,” the company said.
I don’t think it’s misleading, they have removed funding and suspended work.
Could they start again in the future? Sure, but in practical terms removing funding and stopping people from working on a project indefinitely is the same as cancelling. This is just corporate-speak, which requires translation - if removing funding, staff, research space and equipment and stopping all work indefinitely isn’t cancelling something, what extra steps are required for cancelling something?
The different neural approach is reading signals from muscles in your arms, so it’s definitely not the brain-speech interface they were talking about, but the fact they say it’s closer to market will placate investors.
“While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain-computer interface] technologies, we’ve decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market,” the company said.