Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI

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0:39Peter Kafka:Get started today. This stuff doesn't have to be perfect to have profound changes on how the world works. And I think that is very important.

0:54Peter Kafka:From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we are talking about Meta and of course, AI, because it's 2026. I have just gotten a chance to try Meta's newest face computer. They're called Meta VR Glasses. Terrible name. Really cool product. Also a very confusing product. So I wanted to talk about that. I also want to talk about Muse, Meta's buzzy new agent, which is perhaps Meta's first real win in the AI wars. And then I want to talk about the AI wars and AI and whether AI is going to kill us and to explain the national debate about all this and what that might lead to.

1:37Peter Kafka:or might not lead to. Did I talk to three different guests about all this? Nope. Dear listener, I talked to the singular Mike Isaac, longtime New York Times reporter who has covered meta extensively. He's now crushing it on the AI beat. So this one goes a bunch of different places and Mike is a great guide. Okay, here we go. Live on tape from Silicon Valley, it's me talking to Mike Isaac.

2:10Peter Kafka:I'm here with the New York Times fabulous tech reporter, Mike Isaac, who's also my friend. Hi, Mike. What's up, buddy? We're in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. Nice hotel downtown. Not that nice. We just spent the afternoon at Meta looking at new hardware. We're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about AI because that seems to be important these days. We just looked at a pair of$1 ,300 virtual reality glasses, cleverly named meta VR glasses. I really hope someone on the marketing team got paid a fuck ton of money for that. Well, we don't criticize other people's marketing decisions because we all have challenges.

2:50Okay, fair enough.

2:51Peter Kafka:Mike, what'd you think of this hardware? Is it gauche to say that I liked it? It's one of those... You've been captured by meta. Here, should we describe what it is before we get to our impressions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a$1 ,300 pair of glasses. They look very Arnold Schwarzenegger T-800 in the first Terminator movie. I was going with blue blockers, and I showed them to someone else of a certain age, and they said they look like cataract glasses. But they look like space glasses. Yes. And I don't think they look bad. Like, they look like a slimmed down glasses version of the Apple Vision Pro, right?

3:27which is to say not 50 pounds on your head, more like whatever, less than a pound. And they're essentially VR. They are what they say on the tin. They're VR glasses. You're allowed to be in this like virtual immersive environment. You can watch videos that are more immersive. You could play video games. You, I'm sure, were into the workspace at your virtual desk part of the tour. I did.

3:51Peter Kafka:I did try typing. So support for the show comes from Square, the system that fixes one of the biggest headaches in running a business. Starting a business is exciting. Running it is where things get complicated. You end up juggling payments, inventory, staff, scheduling online orders, reports, and somehow you're still supposed to serve customers. Square makes it easier. Whether you're selling coffee, tech accessories, or maybe a podcast. That's right. This podcast is a small business. Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. It does that by bringing payments, point of sales, inventory, staffing, and online sales together in one easy-to-use system.

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5:13Peter Kafka:It's VR with glasses. If you have spent any time thinking about or looking at the Apple Vision Pro, which came out a few years ago, big swing from Apple. Yes. Failure. Has not worked. By all accounts. No one is using them. No one is buying them. In part because they were too expensive. They start at$3 ,500. They're too heavy. Yep. And kind of over-engineered. Amazing tech. Again, I tell everyone to go to the Apple store and try out the demo for free. It's really wild. I did the Metallica one. It was actually incredibly sick. Like, you're not like there, but it was really impressive. And what Meta seems to have done is take the Apple Vision Pro and shrunk it dramatically.

5:59Peter Kafka:Yep. And shrunk the price from$3 ,500 to$1 ,300. That's meaningful. Yep. I still have the same question I had with the Apple Vision Pro, which is the tech's amazing. what do I do with it? Yep. What would you do with this thing? This is the...

6:19Peter Kafka:Support for the show comes from Square, the system that fixes one of the biggest headaches in running a business. Starting a business is exciting. Running it is where things get complicated. You end up juggling payments, inventory, staff, scheduling online orders, reports, and somehow you're still supposed to serve customers. Square makes it easier. Whether you're selling coffee, tech accessories, or maybe a podcast, that's right, this podcast is a small business. Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. It does that by bringing payments, point of sales, inventory, staffing, and online sales together in one easy-to-use system.

6:55Peter Kafka:You get sleek hardware, intuitive software, a host of AI-powered tools that help automate routine tasks, giving you more time back as a seller. With Square, you could sell online, in-store, or both. and customize your setup as your business evolves. If you're starting a business or running one that deserves better tools, Square helps you sell, manage, and grow without slowing down. Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash channels. That's square.com slash go slash channels. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today.

7:36I feel like I say this every time one of these products come out, which is like they are doing genuinely incredible things with the tech. Like I talk to these like product guys who have been doing this for 10, 15 years or whatever. And one of the things that Meta points out is, you know, we didn't just come here in a vacuum. You know, everything we've been doing with VR and the metaverse has compounded to get us to this moment, which is, I think, accurate. Right. That's technology development. I still think this is sort of symptomatic of Silicon Valley, which is like they they have these huge ideas for what they want the future to be.

8:16And we're just not there yet.

8:18Peter Kafka:It's very interesting. Right. When when the Apple Vision Pro came out, they said, you can take this thing on an airplane and watch movies. And then they showed these people who look very sad sitting on airplanes, really unhappy, I guess, watching a movie. And then they said that you could also do work with different monitors. And that is literally what Meta is doing. They're saying, what is the primary use case? You could go on an airplane and watch this. We should also say this is something director James Cameron is very involved in. He's been talking about this for a while. For years now. He's bought in on this.

8:56Peter Kafka:And I think part of the pitch is you can have a fully immersive movie experience at home, wherever you want to be. And I can imagine some worlds where I'm like, oh, I don't like my world around me. I would rather watch a movie. Yeah, sure. You're on a flight to Tokyo or some shit. Right. But if I'm at home, I don't want to wear glasses, especially if I'm around another person. That doesn't make any sense. And I have a$400 TV I bought from Costco eight years ago. it's great it's great tv i don't know why i'd want to put on goggles to watch it and the tech again i can't emphasize enough the tech is super cool the apple vision pro had these hand gestures that you could make to manipulate things but you had to bring your hand up into into the the viewing you had to bring your hands up in front of you to manipulate things yep other glasses that metas come out with you do hand gestures but you um you're attached to some bracelet that's supposed to read the electromagnetic signals your fingers are generating.

9:57Peter Kafka:And in these glasses, you don't have to do any of that. You do hand gestures, but you can literally have your hand just about anywhere. And you can do typing on a virtual keyboard. That's all super impressive. I still am trying to figure out where they go within the end. So here's another way of framing it. Why is meta in the hardware business? They've spent tens and tens of billions of dollars on this. Their virtual reality lab is also where their metaverse energy went. They basically have moved away from the metaverse. They don't talk about the metaverse except they're called meta. That's right.

10:29Peter Kafka:But they are still chasing this hardware. Why is Mark Zuckerberg spending all this time and money on hardware? Well, besides them actually enjoying the idea of inventing new things, I genuinely think it's a company filled with a number of people, a great number of people who like building new technological innovations. And even the most strident meta hater would have to hand it to them and that the stuff they're doing does push the stuff forward. I think a lot of the my thesis is that so much of this stems from Zuckerberg's inability to accept the the lack of control he has on every platform that his properties have ever.

11:12Peter Kafka:If you want to use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, you do it on an Android phone or an Apple phone. That means Apple stands in between Mark Zuckerberg and his customers. That's right. And he has resented from day one the idea that, less so under Steve Jobs because they were actually cool together, but certainly under Tim Cook. I'm actually very curious where this Ternus relationship goes. I remember a meta Apple thing that blew up. Remember, you probably don't remember. ping i no i was at forbes when ping came out i wrote about that and there was a big messy breakup between 100 oh yes between between they were like this was facebook and apple and there was a big fight over it and that's ping sucked and then they were like okay and then we got out of it no so i genuinely think part of this is mark solving a mark problem you know which is we haven't owned the platform we've never owned the platform that's why he bought oculus vr so many years ago 2014 for 2 billion and change or something and i think he thought it was going to happen faster meaning the switch to vr world it hasn't to his credit he has spent a lot of money to make that better and more feasible over time but like if we get to that point in which this becomes like a reality i feel like it's something years to many years sort of thing and still a gamble rather than like this is around the corner but like look like it would i rather wear this on my head on an airplane compared to the apple vision pro 100 this thing actually looks fucking normal compared to the like giant 15 pound apple vision looks less anti-social but you are still cutting yourself off and watching whatever is there a point in which mark zuckerberg goes i have spent literally tens of billions of dollars on this it's not working hit a comment last year something effective this is the year that we're going to find out whether glasses are a mainstream product and if not we kind of have to go back to the drawing board and i filed that away yeah and then also i if you caught the messaging in the demos we were doing i said well we have the oculus we have this gaming thing and it's great but it's a little heavy and people don't work and And we sold tens of millions of them.

13:33Peter Kafka:And I interpret that as we have reached the end of the commercial viability of these things. Totally. We have these meta Ray-Bans that people seem to like. We're going to take yet another stab at virtual reality goggles. But maybe it's their like sort of last effort at it. I don't know if you picked that up. No, I was thinking about that exactly during the demo. Like they're very intentional with their language. And like, that was a sort of pitch saying like, Hey, this is the, I mean, look, they've tried to find a nice way to dance around the fact that the metaverse as they had, it did not work.

14:10Right. And, but like, it's not dead and they're not giving up on it. It's just a very different, I guess, idea of it is what I would say. You know, there's, we could go into, they're still building like a mobile type engine for it or whatever. But like the conception that let's say the average person has is probably in the past from that language.

14:32Peter Kafka:Last thing on the meta VR glasses. When the Apple Vision Pro launched a few years ago, there was a bunch of content from people, a lot of reviews from people saying this is very exciting. Maybe the tech's not quite there, but it's very exciting. This is the future. We're into it. Dude's driving their Tesla Cybertrucks with the glasses on. A lot of people making content for that. Nightmare mode. And then it disappeared, right? I've never seen one using one in the wild. I've never seen anyone use one in the wild. I have talked to people who work with Apple. They're partners with Apple. They've helped create stuff for us.

15:06Peter Kafka:And they say, yes, I have one. It is in my desk. I have never used it after the first time. Long wind up to say, do you think people will be wearing meta VR glasses in the wild six months from now? That's a real... I mean, look, the people who were wearing Apple Vision Pro glasses in the wild were trying were like essentially influencers trying to make statement or like Apple guys or like early adopters. And like and I think that was a stretch, right? Those were people who were trying to like go viral or whatever. I think I think this is one of those things where, look, there's less effort for me to get this out of my desk or from the shelf or underneath my couch or whatever where I store it now.

15:53So there's a better chance of me like pulling that out. I still don't think we're in a world in which people bring this to do their primary work or potentially, you know, watch movies on a plane. But like it's far less cumbersome than in the past. Like it was like putting on a pair of like, let's say ski goggles or something. Right. But like, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know. Mine weren't that heavy, but like with a little like battery pack attached, it was not as

16:20Peter Kafka:the new ones. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like these weigh a hundred grams and you basically it's like sort of five X what standard glasses are, I think, but they don't feel crazy on your face. Yeah. Like it was, I just, I think it's for me, it's not, it's always the story of you were doing incredible things with the technology and society has to catch up with your version of the future and i'd still tbd on whether we want to catch up or not we are lukewarm slash questioning about this piece of meta product we'll be right back with the new york times mike isaac but first this

17:03Peter Kafka:and we're back meanwhile they have a new product that seems to be a hit it has a lot of downloads i don't know what the actual usage is it's muse i think i think if you put a gun to mark zuckerberg's head and said would you rather have meta vr glasses succeed or muse succeed my census, he would say Muse, but why don't we explain what Muse is and how that fits into meta and also the AI moment we're in. I mean, that's a, so Muse, yeah, Muse is their new agent in Valley Parlance. And for a normal person, we would just call it an app or a service. A chatbot, I guess, or even if that, basically it's a digital assistant, let's say.

17:41And like, it's sort of a chatbot that you, you tell to like run different parts of your life, whether it's go schedule my haircut or go negotiate this phone bill that I have or something like that, or go shop for me and buy my groceries or something. Right.

17:58Peter Kafka:In theory, if you wanted to, you could hand Muse and Mark Zuckerberg your credit card information, and it would go buy things for you. You can give it access to your inbox, your email inbox. It will sort through that and tell you. Those seem like crazy ideas to me out here in Silicon Valley. People are very excited about this. There's another app from an indie developer called Instinct, which people are very excited about. And my understanding of the reason that Meta is so excited about this is they've been playing catch up in AI. They've spent billions and billions of dollars to catch up. And this, to me, looks to them like this is proof that our AI is working, that all our efforts are working.

18:42Peter Kafka:And on top of that, it's our proof of concept that if Meta can figure out AI in a way that consumers want it, Meta has billions of customers it can put Muse in front of in a way that, you know, maybe OpenAI and Anthropic can't yet. It has always been the question, in my opinion, like the question around meta and them competing in AI is like, okay, you're like a, you're a social media company. Like, why do we go to you to do this? Right. And often it would be, uh, well, you're going to, you know, like have better photos or Instagram, or you're going to be able to like, you know, post to your, from your glasses automatically using AI, which is like not a very compelling use case.

19:26This is.

19:27Peter Kafka:Most people are not creating social media. which is why all social media companies have to go and find stuff for you to look at instead of what your friends are doing because your friends aren't posting. It's why there are a bunch of creators at Meta Connect this week and only a few guys like you and me. But like this is – I have a colleague, Eli Tan, who covers Meta now, and he used Muse for the past week or so, I want to say, and he was like, this is incredible. This thing has actually changed parts of my life is dealing with a bunch of BS that I don't want to deal with on the regular. And I mean, I recoiled just because of the amount of control he had to give over to these agents to the, to the bot that's controlling his life now, that's assisting his life now.

20:15But I can see a world in which, let's say, people younger than you and I would be okay with the idea, would be okay with the tradeoff. Here's what I'm giving up. Here's the semblance of privacy. And it just won't seem weird to them. Yes. Right. Don't even go through that.

20:32Peter Kafka:I think a lot right in this moment of talking to my dad circa 2002 or something where he's like, I'm not going to give my credit card to this company called Amazon on the internet. They could steal my information. And at this point I'm already using Amazon. I'm like, dad, it's at least as safe as giving your credit card to the waiter or the clerk who can go steal it as well. And recounting this conversation in 2026 seems crazy. I can imagine a world where X number of years from now, of course I give all my, yes, I could also use a rotary phone or a horse and buggy, but why I don't want, I don't want to do that.

21:11Peter Kafka:So maybe we, and we should say like some of the stuff Muse can do if you allow it to is pretty amazing. It can literally make phone calls on your behalf. It can call up other customer service reps who may not want to talk to him as the bot, it's a different issue, but it can theory like go advocate for you in the real world, which is wild. You can also just use it the way I've been using it right now. It was just a chat GPT competitor. Oh, like Google basically? Just literally as chat GPT. I just ask it questions that I would ask chat and it seems to do as good a job for what my purpose is as chat.

21:44That's interesting. Okay. I mean, look, I agree with you. We are old for better or worse. And like every generation has their, I would argue every generation has their like here's about as far as I go on this stuff and this is where I'm stopping. I think the caveat I would add to this is that agents are still very new and like the data sort of like walled offness of a lot of these things feels very tenuous.

22:15Peter Kafka:And there's a story right now about Amazon who has a lot to lose in an agent world because because if you tell your agent to go buy you some socks, it may get them from Amazon, it may get them Target, it may get them forever. And also you won't go to Amazon and Amazon can't show you ads. And so, and I just, if you're a channels listener, you've heard me and Jason Del Rey have this conversation recently. Jason. So that is an interesting fight brewing, right? Like it's, you know, what do Mark Zuckerberg and Andy Jassy slash Jeff Bezos, like how do they resolve this? Is it a resolvable problem or is it?

22:52I don't think so. I think that's like if you believe that the future is agents talking to one another, are you going to disintermediate yourself from that? Are you going to tell your customers to no longer browse Amazon where Mark Zuckerberg's agent is now browsing Amazon and you get all that data from that? I don't think so. I think that which also kind of breaks the model, right? If everyone has their own agent that doesn't communicate with everyone else, then that Internet doesn't work. But I don't know if we're even anywhere near that yet because I have no idea how many people are using these things

23:24Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with Mike Isaac, but first this