In many ways, we’re living in the world that Mark Zuckerberg built. No other person is as responsible for social media’s rapid ascendance into ubiquity over the last two decades. The platforms he runs — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — see more than 3 billion users total every day, and create billions in quarterly profit for corporate parent Meta.
All that money buys staying power, and this week, Zuckerberg made his next goal abundantly clear. He wants to put a pair of tech-laden glasses on every willing face — artificial intelligence, an inch from your eyes. In a blog post Wednesday, the Bay Area CEO said glasses that “can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”
On his company’s Wednesday earnings call, Zuckerberg said he’d feel disadvantaged if he didn’t wear his contact lenses for a day. Then he said he thinks that in the future, if you don’t wear glasses with AI or another AI-infused device, you’ll similarly be “at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people who you’re working with, or competing against.”
Eleven years after the ill-fated release of Google Glass, which prompted a backlash and gave rise to the term “glasshole,” Zuckerberg’s vision is of a thoroughly altered way of life, where we interact with each other through a veil of technology. One can imagine that his “AI assistant” could be in constant dialogue with the glasses’ wearer, creating an always-on stream of ideas, images and words — a task for which we currently rely on our brains and, to an extent, our phones. These glasses’ uses could violate; they could also feel totally bizarre. The person you’re talking to might record you without you knowing, or get tips from their glasses on who you are and what to say. They might also be watching an Instagram Reel in the corner of their eye.
Glasses, Zuckerberg said, are “basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI” and “are going to be the ideal way to blend the physical and digital worlds together.”
Those predictions each tie to places where Meta has invested heavily. For years, Meta poured money into popular virtual reality and mixed-reality Quest headsets while peddling the less popular idea of a digital “metaverse” where we’d live part of our lives. And more recently, the company has gone full tilt investing in AI development, putting tens of billions of dollars toward data centers and offering staggering pay packages to top researchers.
Zuckerberg is now framing his company’s AI efforts around what he called in the Wednesday post “personal superintelligence.” In the blog post, he said that instead of “centrally” organized AI “automating all valuable work,” Meta believes in giving people individual access to smart, empowering AI systems — that’s where the glasses come in. (Zuckerberg has also said he thinks AI bots could help stem the so-called “loneliness epidemic.”)
The CEO isn’t the only tech leader talking about an AI-native device — that’s the entire basis of the partnership between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Apple veteran Jony Ive that SFGATE reported on — but Zuckerberg already has prototypes out in public. Meta currently sells glasses built with Ray-Ban and Oakley that connect to Meta’s AI app. Still, they’re a far cry from his goal of totally enmeshing the physical and digital. And the CEO himself doesn’t seem too sure what exactly these future glasses will look like; on the earnings call, he said the display could be a “wide holographic field of view” or just a smaller display for a little information.
But now that he’s found a way to marry his metaverse investments with his AI spending, the CEO is pressing his foot on the gas. He has the money and the control over his company to drive forward on this glasses idea — as zany as it sounds now. On the call, talking about the company’s work with glasses up to this point, Zuckerberg sounded utterly earnest.
“That’s something that we’re excited to keep on investing in heavily,” he said, “because I think it’s going to be a really important part of the future.”
Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
