Mark Zuckerberg claims that in the future, people without AI-capable smart glasses will be “at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage”.
Zuckerberg made the claim as part of his response to a Wall Street analyst’s question during Meta’s Q2 2025 earnings call this week. The analyst asked Zuckerberg for an update on the pace of Meta’s grand goal of building out smart glasses as “the next computing platform”, and whether he saw them replacing smartphones eventually.
Here’s Zuckerberg’s full response:
“This product category is clearly doing quite well. And I think it’s good for a lot of things. It is stylish eyewear, so people like wearing them just as glasses. It has a bunch of interesting functionality. And then the use of Meta AI in them just continues to grow, and the percent of people who are using it for that on a daily basis is increasing, and that’s all good to see.
I continue to think that glasses are going to be the ideal form factor for AI because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, talk to you. Once you get a display in there, whether it’s the kind of wide holographic field of view like we showed with Orion or just a smaller display that might be good for displaying some information. And that’s also going to unlock a lot of value where you can just interact with an AI assistant 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.
I personally think that – I wear contact lenses, I feel like if I didn’t have my vision corrected, I’d be sort of at a cognitive disadvantage going through the world. And 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 be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people who you’re working with, or competing against.
So I think that this is a pretty fundamental form factor. There are a lot of different versions of it. Right now we’re building ones that I think are stylish, but aren’t focused on the display. I think that there’s a whole set of different things to explore with displays.
This is kind of what we’ve been maxing out with Reality Labs over the last 5 to 10 years, basically doing the research on all of these different things. 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.
It’s just that if you’d asked me five years ago, whether we’d have kind of holograms that created immersive experiences or superintelligence first, I think most people would have thought that you’d get the holograms first. And it’s this interesting kind of quirk of the tech industry that I think we’re going to end up having really strong AI first. But because we’ve been investing in this, I think we’re just several years ahead on building out glasses. And I think that, that’s something that we’re excited to keep on investing in heavily because I think it’s going to be a really important part of the future.”
The response comes just days after Meta’s partner EssilorLuxottica, the French-Italian eyewear giant that owns the Ray-Ban brand, revealed that sales of the smart glasses so far this year have more than tripled compared to the same time last year, more than 200% growth. Its CEO told investors that the glasses are performing “exceptionally well” in the market.
While Meta originally expected Ray-Ban Meta to be its last smart glasses without a display, it’s now working with EssilorLuxottica on a range of options from across its portfolio. The limited edition of the new Oakley Meta HSTN glasses has already started shipping, and regular editions should go on sale sometime in the next few weeks. Last year Meta and EssilorLuxottica signed an agreement extending their partnership “into the next decade” to develop “multi-generational smart eyewear products”. And last month, Meta invested €3 billion in EssilorLuxottica, taking a 3% stake in the company, and it’s reportedly “considering” further investment to bring this to 5% over time.
David Heaney
Of course, as Zuckerberg references, Meta is also developing a range of higher-end smart glasses with displays.
The first of these will launch later this year, according to The Verge, The Information, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, and leaks suggest it will be called Meta Celeste.
Meta Celeste will have a small heads-up display (HUD) in the right eye. Leaks suggest that this HUD will show the time, weather, notifications, previews of captured photos, turn-by-turn navigation directions, captions and translations of real world speech, and Meta AI responses as text instead of audio.
Reportedly priced north of $1000, Celeste will include Meta’s long-in-development sEMG wristband in the box for finger gesture controls.
David Heaney
While Celeste will have a display, it will only be in one eye, won’t have a particularly wide field of view, and it won’t have positional tracking. Thus, it won’t be able to anchor virtual objects and interfaces into the real world.
Meta has been working on true AR glasses for around 10 years now, though, and at its Connect 2024 conference showed off a fully-integrated AR glasses prototype, Orion.
However, the company admitted that Orion itself won’t become a product, as it relies on a material that isn’t yet possible to affordably manufacture at scale, and won’t be any time soon, such that each unit would have to cost over $10,000 to sell.
As such, Meta is building a separate AR glasses product, codenamed Artemis, that the company revealed to The Verge’s Alex Heath will use glass lenses, the same material as Snap Spectacles and earlier AR devices like HoloLens and Magic Leap. This means that Meta’s Artemis will almost certainly not have the signature wide field of view of Orion.
David Heaney
Meta Connect 2025 will take place from September 17, and we expect Meta to announce Celeste then and open preorders for shipping in October, assuming it doesn’t get delayed.
In April, Mark Gurman reported that some Meta employees were working weekends to ship the HUD glasses on time. In just under two months, we should know whether these efforts succeeded.
