Mark Zuckerberg says it's 'hard to imagine' a future without AI glasses – but there's bad news from the metaverse

• Mark Zuckerberg has been hyping 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 the best smart glasses of today are better than they've ever been, but they're yet to really 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 for the last financial quarter.

Speaking on an earnings call (via TechCrunch), Zuckerberg went on the record as saying "it's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren't AI glasses" – comparing the wearable revolution he's anticipating to the move 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 within the last year.

There's certainly plenty of interest from tech manufacturers: Google and Samsung have smart glasses on the way, with Samsung separately confirming that its long-anticipated 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 drive its future smart glasses products.

Meanwhile, in the metaverse...

Zuckerberg will be hoping that the smart glasses category turns out better than his efforts to date in making the metaverse happen: as CNBC reports, Meta Reality Labs posted a $6 billion loss for the last quarter of 2025, up from $4.43 billion the quarter before.

The metaverse, you may remember, is the completely virtual world that Meta hoped we would all be living in by now – it's partly why the company was renamed from Facebook to Meta. While a sizable number of us enjoy gaming in VR, there hasn't been much interest from users in spending a substantial chunk 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'll have to see what happens, but those financial losses are continuing to go in the wrong direction. The future for smart glasses looks somewhat brighter, especially with the continuing advances in AI assistants to power them.

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