Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Meta’s ambitions for its AI smart glasses business during Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings call on Wednesday.
After pivoting its Reality Labs investment away from Metaverse, Meta is doubling down on its production of AI wearables and its own AI models.
“Billions of people wear glasses or contacts to correct their vision, and I think we’re at a similar point in time to when smartphones came out. It was clearly a matter of time before all these flip phones became smartphones,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s hard to imagine a world in a few years where most of the glasses people wear aren’t AI glasses.”
He added that sales of Meta’s glasses have tripled within the last year and that he believes glasses are “some of the fastest growing consumer electronics products in history.”
Take Zuckerberg’s outlook with a grain of salt. As it turned out, he thought we’d go to work and play with friends in the Metaverse (legs are optional), but that didn’t work out.
But looking at how the tech industry’s biggest companies are allocating their money and effort, it looks like AI glasses are poised for a big moment, even if it’s not on the scale of smartphones.
Google plans to launch a line of smart glasses this year following a $150 million deal with Warby Parker. Bloomberg also reports that Apple plans to introduce smart glasses in the next year or two and move some staff to that project instead of working on the lighter Vision Pro. Meanwhile, Snap announced on Tuesday that it will spin off its AR glasses Spex into a new subsidiary, allowing for “even greater focus and collaboration.”
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Even OpenAI, a company that hasn’t yet entered hardware, is pursuing AI wearables, but it seems more focused on things like AI pins and earbuds than glasses. Apple is also rumored to be working on AirTag-sized AI devices, and we hope those efforts will be better than the Humane AI pin.
For now, Meta is leading the way in bringing smart glasses to market, with several different models already on the market. This also includes Oakley’s smart glasses, which are designed to be worn while exercising, and are the most promising use case for these devices that we’ve personally seen so far.
