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It’s that time of year again—when geeky men stand on stage wearing ugly glasses. Last week, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel gave a detailed demonstration of his forthcoming Specs augmented reality glasses, which were first unveiled in June. This week, it’s Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s turn. Meta holds its annual Connect conference, where it shows off new hardware, with Zuckerberg’s keynote scheduled for Wednesday. And you can bet he’ll be on stage wearing at least one pair of glasses.
The Information has already scooped one of the possible announcements—about a camera-free pair of smart glasses to go on sale in October. According to our story last week, by my colleague Jyoti Mann, Meta will also unveil new AR glasses. Here’s a question, though: What happened to the AR-like glasses that got so much attention at last year’s Connect?
You might remember that this time last year, Zuckerberg stood on stage wearing the Ray-Ban Display, which has the ability to display images on one of its lenses, allowing people to send texts, make phone calls and take pictures with related images shown in their glasses. It even shows subtitles for the person you’re speaking to. Users wear a wristband and click their fingers to send commands. The glasses looked interesting, although judging by the demonstration, they were a bit glitchy (Zuckerberg had repeated problems making a phone call). And the finger movements made it look like he had some kind of OCD fidgeting problem. (Spiegel’s demonstration of the Specs last week was similar, down to the fidgety finger movements).
The Ray-Ban Displays went on sale a short time later. In late October, on an earnings call, Zuckerberg said the glasses were “sold out in almost every store.” At the Consumer Electronics show in January, Meta announced new features for the glasses and also revealed that demand was so strong Meta had suspended the international expansion so it could concentrate on fulfilling orders for the U.S. A couple of blog posts, including this one in May, highlighted new features. But aside from a brief mention in April, executives have said nothing on earnings calls about the glasses. And availability is still limited to the U.S.
Meanwhile, reviewsonline havebeenmixed. I have to bet that if this product had been a hit, Meta executives would have talked a lot more about it. Presumably we’ll get an update this week.
Jensen’s Diary
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang should really be keeping a diary, if he isn’t already. Some day in the future, he’ll have a great book to write. Last week, he met with King Charles, talked with President Donald Trump via phone on stage at the All In summit and walked the floor of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference with Marc Benioff (prompting some amusing memes about their relative heights). This week, Huang is attending Trump’s state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The dinner is one stop on Xi’s much-anticipated trip to the U.S., the focus of which is a meeting between Trump and Xi. The two have lots to talk about—tariffs, U.S. export blocks on technology like Nvidia’s AI chips and AI safety. While a joint agreement to work together on AI safety would be well timed, given all the chatter this past week about AI’s threat to humanity, the chances of that happening are doubtful.
Trump has dismissed concerns about AI safety. And there’s too much competition between the two countries in this arena to imagine them coming together. From the U.S. standpoint, the lack of agreement in the industry surely complicates our ability to negotiate with the Chinese. As for China, as a former State Department official responsible for AI diplomacy, Seth Center, said in an opinion piece in The New York Times on Wednesday, “if the past is prologue, China will have little interest in anything beyond gaining a competitive advantage.”
In Other News
• CoreWeave said on Friday it had priced $3.7 billion in convertible bonds, more than the AI cloud provider had previously said it was targeting.
• Google acknowledged that its Gemini AI model unexpectedly breached the networks of three outside companies during safety evaluations conducted by third-party testing firm Irregular last May, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• President Donald Trump on Saturday said he was creating a new “AI Force,” that would be similar to his Space Force—the arm of the Defense Department focused on space combat started by Trump during his first administration—and he planned to appoint a new AI czar to lead it.
Friday on The Information’s TITV
Check out Friday’s episode of TITV in which we discuss the debate around the independence of AI model review organizations.
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