- Mark Zuckerberg hyped up AI glasses in 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 the best smart glasses today are better than they’ve ever been, but they’re yet to become mainstream — something Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is confident will happen in the future, even though his digital metaverse company posted a whopping $6 billion loss for its last fiscal quarter.
Speaking on an earnings call (via TechCrunch ), Zuckerberg said “it’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most of the glasses people wear aren’t AI glasses” — likening the wearable revolution he expects to the transition from classic flip phones to smartphones.
Zuckerberg pointed out that billions of people worldwide wear glasses or contacts for vision correction, which is a lot of potential customers. He also said that sales of Meta smart specs (including the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2) have tripled in the last year.
There’s certainly plenty of interest from tech manufacturers: Google and Samsung have smart glasses on the way, with Samsung each confirming their long-awaited AR glasses are coming 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 be hoping that the smart glasses category performs better than his efforts to date to make the metaverse happen: As CNBC reports, Meta Reality Labs had a loss of $6 billion for the last quarter of 2025, up from $4.43 billion the previous quarter.
The Metaverse, you might remember, is the completely virtual world that Meta hoped we’d all be living in now—it’s partly why the company was renamed from Facebook to Meta. Although a significant number of us enjoy gaming in VR, there hasn’t been much interest from users in spending a significant 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 Meta’s metaverse) could become more of a Roblox clone, with more of a focus on mobile devices.
We will have to see what happens, but the economic losses continue to go in the wrong direction. The future of smart glasses looks somewhat brighter, especially with the continued advancements in AI assistants to power them.
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