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Here’s a suggestion for Mark Zuckerberg: Maybe you should ditch AI model development and spend even more on smart glasses! Meta Platforms on Tuesday unveiled its latest selection of smart glasses, devised with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, and it’s hard not to be impressed with the way they look. Meta would seem to have more chance of succeeding with smart glasses than beating the leading AI labs in developing state-of-the-art models.
One big question is just what anyone’s using these glasses for. Meta says glasses are “the most exciting hardware category of the AI era,” and with that in mind, its smart glasses have its AI assistant built in. But my bet, based on asking random wearers of the glasses, is that they are using them as a convenient way to make phone calls, listen to music and take photos more than anything else. (We suspect Meta would disagree.) Even if that is all anyone is using the glasses for, though, that’s not nothing.
Many people will likely find glasses that make phone calls and play music a big advance over other wearables. (How many brands of earbuds have to fall out of my ears onto the street before I get an ear infection? Just wondering.) And by getting these glasses in widespread circulation, Meta has one up on other companies—including Google, OpenAI and eventually Apple—who are likely to follow with their own AI-equipped wearables.
At $299 a pair, the new styles are $80 cheaper than the older Ray-Bans Meta line introduced a couple of years ago and $200 cheaper than a new line of Ray-Ban Meta Optics unveiled in March. While buyers who need prescription lenses will have to fork over a lot more, Meta’s pricing should be low enough to entice even more people to buy a pair.
So far, demand is growing—Meta says sales tripled last year—but EssilorLuxottica said it sold 7 million pairs of AI glasses, which means the market is still relatively small. (By comparison, the smartphone market this year will be 1.09 billion units, according to IDC). Still, Zuckerberg has a point when he notes that billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction. He said in January, “I think we’re in a moment similar to when smartphones arrived,” replacing flip phones. “It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.” That’s probably true.
Oracle’s Staff Cuts
When it comes to layoffs, Oracle is stealthy. It doesn’t make a big announcement or send out a blog post. The only clue, aside from leaks in the news media, are restructuring charges it reports in its financial statements, including for severance.
But Oracle revealed in a securities filing this week that it had trimmed its global workforce by 13%, or 21,000 people, in the past year, to 141,000. A breakdown shows that the small hardware team was hit harder than most, losing a third of its people. In contrast, the cloud and software unit only lost 10%.
Even with the company’s slimmed-down profile, Oracle’s revenue per employee remains far below that of bigger rivals such as Microsoft. In its just completed fiscal year, Oracle’s employees generated about $478,000 in revenue each, while Microsoft’s generated $1.2 million each.
In Other News
• ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.5, its new AI video-generation model, at a conference in Beijing. The model upgrades its predecessor, Seedance 2.0, which was widely hailed as a major breakthrough for AI videos.
• Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup founded by former Google researchers, has launched Fugu, a new AI service that coordinates multiple AI models through one interface.
• OpenAI’s ad chief, Dave Dugan, said at Cannes this week that around 20% of ChatGPT queries have a “direct commercial intent,” demonstrating that a user is looking to buy a specific product. A greater proportion of queries, he said, extend beyond requests for specific products and signal that the user could be interested in purchasing something down the line.
• Meta is building a prediction market app that could rival offerings from Polymarket and Kalshi, The New York Times reported.
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