- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s second-quarter earnings call that people who don’t wear smart glasses in the future may be at a “pretty significant cognitive disadvantage” compared to those who do. Zuckerberg’s comments come as Meta has established a “superintelligence” lab fueled with highly paid researchers to progress on AI. The company’s second-quarter earnings reported Wednesday surpassed analyst expectations.
Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always been an early adopter of new tech, but now he says those who don’t adopt smart glasses, which sit at the bleeding edge of wearable technology, may be at risk of falling behind.
Zuckerberg said in the company’s second-quarter earnings call that future humans will want to wear smart glasses, like his company’s $299 Meta Ray-Bans, out of necessity.
“I think in the future, if you don’t have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you’re kind of similarly, probably [going to] be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you’re working with, or competing against,” he said during the call.
Just like regular eye glasses that help correct bad vision, smart glasses will be the main way people access and use AI, as well as “superintelligence,” to which Zuckerberg’s company has dedicated a highly paid team of researchers led by AI wunderkind Alexandr Wang.
Zuckerberg said he is encouraged by the sales growth for the smart glasses and added that people are using Meta’s smart glasses more often because they are actually “stylish eyewear.” Revenue from the Meta Ray-Bans more than tripled year-over-year, according to Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica’s most recent earnings report.
The Meta AI that runs the glasses is continually improving, Zuckerberg added, and the future could hold more notable hardware upgrades as well, including a visual display.
“That’s also going to unlock a lot of value where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day in this multimodal way. It can see the content around you, it can generate a UI for you, show you information and be helpful,” he said.
This type of full immersion in tech, with the help of smart glasses, could also help Meta realize Zuckerberg’s former favorite buzzword: the metaverse.
“The other thing that’s awesome about glasses is, they are going to be the ideal way to blend the physical and digital worlds together. So the whole metaverse vision, I think, is going to end up being extremely important, too, and AI is going to accelerate that, too,” Zuckerberg said.
After debuting its Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses in 2021, the company has since expanded the collection to include the Oakley brand for a line of “performance AI glasses” for athletes. The company plans to release full-fledged AR glasses by 2027, The Verge reported.
Meta on Wednesday beat analyst expectations and its performance in the same quarter last year with revenue of $47.5 billion for the second quarter. The company also reported a 36% year-over-year jump in profit at $18.3 billion for the quarter.
