- Mark Zuckerberg has been promoting AI glasses on Meta’s latest earnings call
- Sales of Meta models have tripled in the last year
- But Meta’s metaverse company is losing a lot of money
There’s no doubt that today’s best smart glasses are better than ever, but they’re yet to go mainstream, something Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is confident will happen in the future, even as his digital metaverse company posted a hefty $6 billion loss in the latest financial quarter.
Speaking on an earnings call (via TechCrunch), Zuckerberg went on record to say that “it’s hard to imagine a world in several years where the majority of glasses people use are not AI glasses,” comparing the wearable revolution he anticipates to the shift from classic flip phones to smartphones.
Zuckerberg noted that billions of people around the world use glasses or contact lenses to correct vision, which represents a large number of potential customers. It also said that sales of smart Meta specs (including the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2) have tripled in the last year.
There’s certainly a lot of interest from tech makers: Google and Samsung have smart glasses on the way, and Samsung separately confirms that its long-awaited AR glasses will arrive later this year.
Apple is rumored to be working on its own pair, and earlier this week Snapchat developer Snap announced a new subsidiary called Specs to power its future smart glasses products.
Zuckerberg will hope the smart glasses category does better than his efforts to date to make the metaverse a reality: As CNBC reports, Meta Reality Labs posted a loss of $6 billion for the final quarter of 2025, down from $4.43 billion in the previous quarter.
The metaverse, as you may remember, is the completely virtual world that Meta expected us all to be living in by now; It’s partly the reason the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta. While a considerable number of us enjoy gaming in virtual reality, there hasn’t been much interest from users in spending a substantial portion of their time as digital avatars.
Meta isn’t completely giving up on the metaverse, and there have been suggestions that Horizon (which is the official name of the Meta metaverse) could become more of a Roblox clone, with more of a focus on mobile.
We’ll have to see what happens, but those financial losses continue to go in the wrong direction. The future of smart glasses looks somewhat brighter, especially with continued advances in artificial intelligence assistants to power them.
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