Meta's AI Surge: Smart Glasses & Billions

0:00Mark Zuckerberg is no longer willing to fall behind on a recent investor call. He said that they, quote, rebuilt the foundation of our AI program. And he said, over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products. And I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the new year. So a lot is changing in Meta. Today on the podcast, I want to break down all of their new AI improvements, as well as some of the things he said about smart glasses and where we're going to see that in the future. Before we get into all of that, before we get into all of that, if you've ever wanted to build a tool and you're not a developer, I'd love for you to try out my software platform, which is called AIbox.ai.

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1:13All right, let's talk about what's going on with Meta. Mark Zuckerberg says that Meta is going to start seeing new AI models and products within months. This is of course following their huge internal reset that they did for their whole AI company. I mean, there was just a lot of drama in this, but we had Yan La Kun who left, who was formerly their head of AI. We had a ton of acquisitions. Meta has been spending a ton of money. And apparently, 2026 is going to be the year that they start bringing out all of their new models, which are going to be coming in the next few months, apparently. And they said that they're going to steadily push the frontier over the course of the new year.

1:48Mark Zuckerberg didn't give specific timelines. He also repeatedly emphasized that a lot of their AI driven commerce is going to be a near term priority, something they're working on right now. He said, quote, this also has implications for commerce. New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right set of products from the business in our catalog, from the businesses in our catalog. Meta is definitely not the first person to do this. We've seen OpenAI and Google both kind of introduce these agent based transaction platforms, whether they're partnering with Stripe and Uber, both of those companies are also doing things.

2:23And so there's a lot of these sort of quote unquote, you know, agentic shopping tools, but I think meta really is positioned well to be a big one. And especially when we see just how successful TikTok shop has been, I think this is something that meta could do really well at. I think their bet right now is that their advantage isn't just in the infrastructure, but in all of the data that they have. They said, quote, we're starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our interests, our content, and our relationships. A lot of what makes agents valuable is the unique context that they can see.

2:56And we believe Meta can deliver a uniquely personal experience. What's interesting to me is when you look at what OpenAI is doing, OpenAI has, you know, everything you ever ask it about, everything you ever say, they can store in memory and they can have this kind of dossier that they build on you unless you turn the memory very often. A lot of people like that, I mean, myself included, because it makes it more personalized. It's able to know what you want, what you think, the projects you're working on, the businesses you work in, all of that kind of stuff. What's interesting is Zuckerberg already has access to a ton of that just historical data from your relationships to everything about you that he's, you know, got from your interests on Instagram or Facebook.

3:32And so it's, they already have that. And so as soon as they plug it into AI, it kind of gives them a bit of a leg up in that regard. So I think this strategy was really kind of reinforced in December when Meta acquired the general purpose agent developer Manus. At the time, the company said it was going to continue operating the service while also integrating their technology across its products. A lot of people questioned, myself included. I'm like, I mean, it's a cool tool, but like, why are they buying Manus? And I think once you start looking at it from the perspective of what you can do with commerce, maybe that starts to make a little bit more sense.

4:03So this whole investor call was happening with Meta's latest earnings release, which showed there was a sharp increase in infrastructure spending. The company now, they're expecting to invest between$115 billion and$135 billion in capital just this year. That's up from$72 billion that they did last year. So in their filings, Meta said basically the jump is, quote, increased investment to support our Meta super intelligence lab efforts and core business. So I think this is definitely a lot. That figure is still much lower than the roughly$600 billion in AI infrastructure spending that Zuckerberg was kind of talking about projected through 2028.

4:44So perhaps that spending ramps up, or maybe it's just lower than, you know, the former projection. But either way, I mean, some people are saying like, look, it's not as much as he was quoting. But I mean, if you're saying$135 billion this year, then over the next three years that's you know 400 billion and so i think it's it's pretty pretty close to 600 billion especially if you see any sort of ramp and zuckerberg typically likes to ramp things up meta has definitely faced a lot of kind of ongoing investor skepticism over how their massive ai investments are going to actually translate into revenue because they built meta ai and all this stuff but it's free inside of all of their apps they're not making money from it uh zuckerberg said that the visible consumer impact is going to be coming soon so he's like Just wait, hold your horses.

5:30He said, this is going to be a big year for delivering personal super intelligence, accelerating our business, building infrastructure for the future, and shaping how our company will work going forward. He also kind of used the whole investor earnings call to outline some of Meta's push into the AI-powered smart glasses, which personally I'm very excited about. I think they have a really big leg up. We've seen Google also working on this as well, and Apple's rumored to potentially be thinking about it. But I think Meta really is winning and they're in the lead right now with their smart glasses and their collaborations with Ray-Bans and Oakleys.

6:03What's interesting with all of that is, you know, they're pulling back from their metaverse investments, their reality labs. They're cutting a lot of different programs there. So it feels like it's kind of getting allocated elsewhere. Zuckerberg said, billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction were at a moment similar to when smartphones arrived. It was only a matter of time before flip phones became smartphones. it's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses people wear aren't AI glasses. I'm going to agree with Zuckerberg on this and say I think one of Meta's biggest advantages, right?

6:35I think they built like these VR headsets and they were like, they're going to be their own compute platform. And even Apple, when they came out with their VR headset, was like, it's spatial compute, right? They all want to like make it a new device, a new kind of system. and Meta kind of wanted to do it to get away from the Apple and Google duopoly of, you know, smartphone operating systems. They wanted to build their own operating system. The VR headsets just isn't, you know, something that everyone's going to walk around with a VR headset, but everyone would walk around with glasses and glasses basically give you all of the same functionality and benefits where you have a speaker next to your ear, you have a camera on the front of it, you have a microphone in it that you can talk to.

7:12It's, you know, it can superimpose things onto your lens. It's just so useful. I think it's going to be a big shift. And you'll actually see people using those more and more other instead of just like a smartphone, for example. So Zuckerberg also said that the sale of metaglasses tripled over the last year. He said they were some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history. Obviously, he's very optimistic. You can take it with a grain of salt. Zuckerberg once said that we would all, you know, work and socialize in the metaverse. And of course, there's all the drama about there not being any legs in the metaverse on all the metaverse things and his vision with that didn't materialize.

7:48So some people are kind of being skeptical about it. But as someone that has seen these in action, I really think the Ray-Ban and kind of these smart glasses are way different. They're super useful. They're something that people are already used to wearing. You don't have to learn anything new. It's already on your face. It's just a faster way to get information. So I honestly think this is going to be a much bigger jump and it's going to have a much bigger lift a lot more people use them so i think there is a lot of industry momentum it suggests that these ai glasses is going to be approaching a really big kind of it's it feels like it's kind of this inflection point um even if they're not kind of where smartphones were like he's like everyone's going to go to glasses from smartphones i don't know if that will happen i think people will just keep their smartphone because we're so used to how we interact with that for the time being anyways but i definitely think this is going to be something in addition and you're not going to pull your phone out of your pocket if you could just ask your glasses and and see it right on your eyes or hear it right in your ear, get the answer and just move on with your life.

8:42I mean, basically, whoever can lower the friction the most and keep, you know, keep you getting the results you want as the fastest possible is going to win. And we saw that from the switch from basic Google search to ChatGPT, which I basically use for every what I would have done Google search for, you know, five or six years ago, it's all on ChatGPT now. And I think that we'll see something similar. If you could just talk to your glasses right there, and it could get you your answer immediately in your ear. For a lot of use cases, that's going to be good. Maybe sometimes you want to do some deeper digging and you're going to want to see the graph but then again with these smart glasses if you can superimpose the graph on your lens i think you're going to be able to do a lot with them and you don't have to pull something out of your pocket you could just talk and trigger it i think google is going to be launching their own smart glasses this year they had a 150 million dollar partnership with warby parker apple apparently is planning a glasses launch within the next quote-unquote couple of years i wouldn't really count on i'm not counting on apple for anything big right now with this they were very late to vr they've been late to ai there feels like they're late to everything so great if they come with some glasses in two years i'm sure they'll be cool glasses but i think meta is going to eat up a lot of the market share in the meantime so i think um apple is basically going to start moving a lot of their staff though away from the vision pro to this the vision pro is basically a flop as far as an apple product goes according to bloomberg it just uh didn't didn't sell as much as they were hoping meanwhile snapchat announced that they were going to spin out their AR glasses unit specs into a standalone subsidiary for so it has better focus.

10:09And for those that don't remember, like Snapchat Spectacle glasses, these were the coolest thing years and years ago before Meta even ever got into this space. So I think Snapchat is a little bit forgotten. If they can keep up, I think that they do also have a good product if this market is growing. So even Open AI now, which has definitely not released any hardware, they're also exploring hardware AI wearables. They haven't explained exactly what those are. There's a lot of different kind of ideas. People think that they might be like a pin or an earbud or glasses. Apple is rumored to be working on an Airtag sized AI device as well that's going to compete with that.

10:47But I think right now no one really knows and everyone has been very cautious with that, especially after the humane AI pin kind of flopped. So for now, I think Meta is basically the most aggressive player in this hardware market. They're actually shipping AI glasses at scale. They actually work. I have a lot of friends, a lot of friends that are not in tech that are just like, yeah, I got these cool meta Ray-Bans. Look at all the cool things. I can take pictures and do all this stuff like on the go. And I think people really like them. So they have a lot of different markets, a lot of different models.

11:17They have Oakley's as well that they're kind of doing more for like workouts, which I think might be a really compelling real world use case for this category so far. Overall, I think that Meta is going to be definitely if they can keep the innovation up, I think they'll be able to keep ahead of a lot of different people. And I'm definitely impressed because this was not my expectation that Meta would be the hardware leader, especially when you have companies like Google that have a lot more experience in this, but have just been slower to put something to market. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes.

11:45Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, if you wouldn't mind leaving a rating and review, it really helps to show a ton. I would appreciate it so, so much. It basically just helps more people find it. The algorithm pushes out the show when people are leaving reviews. So it would help me out a ton if you could do that on Apple. It's you can leave a comment. I read them all on Spotify. You hit the about tab and you can drop some stars. So thanks so much for tuning in. And I will catch you guys on the next episode. Always make sure to go check out AI box.ai. If you want to try building and getting access to over 40 of the top AI models for 20 bucks a month, all in one place.

12:22All right, catch you in the next episode.