• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts not wearing smart glasses will become a "cognitive disadvantage."
• Zuckerberg sees glasses as the "ideal form factor" for AI.
• Meta has been ramping up its glasses business by partnering with Ray-Ban and Oakley.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks smart glasses are the future.

During Meta's second-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg doubled down on the idea that smart glasses will soon become the main way people interact with AI and replace other devices as "primary computing devices."

"I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI," he told investors on Wednesday's call, adding that wearables with cameras, microphones, and displays will unlock new levels of utility.

"I think in the future, if you don't have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you'd probably be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg's bullish sentiments on AI wearables echo his letter earlier in the day, which predicted the rise of "personal superintelligence."

"Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful," wrote Zuckerberg in the letter published on Meta's blog.

Meta has been ramping up its wearables business with its Ray-Ban smart glasses and a recent partnership with Oakley. The devices let users stream music, take photos, record video, and ask Meta's chatbot about what they're seeing.

Sales have been "accelerating," according to the earnings report, and helped drive a revenue increase of nearly 5% for the Reality Labs division.

Meta has also been investing billions in acquiring AI talent, often from competing companies with jaw-dropping offers. Zuckerberg invested $15 billion in Scale AI to bring its CEO, Alexandr Wang, into the fold and lured at least four employees from OpenAI, one of whom is a co-creator of ChatGPT.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Get ready to see Android in a new-ish way. It's been 13 years since Google announced its Google Glass headset and 10 years since it stopped selling the device to consumers. There have been other attempts to make smart glasses work, but none of them have stuck. As simpler devices like the Meta Ray-Ban glasses have slowly built a following, Google is getting back into the smart glasses game. After announcing Android XR late last year, the first usable devices were on site at Google I/O. And you're not going to believe this, but the experience is heavily geared toward Gemini.

As Google is fond of pointing out, Android XR is its first new OS developed in the "Gemini era." The platform is designed to run on a range of glasses and headsets that make extensive use of Google's AI bot, but there were only two experiences on display at I/O: an AR headset from Samsung known as Project Moohan and the prototype smart glasses.

Moohan is a fully enclosed headset, but it defaults to using passthrough video when you put it on. If you've worn an Apple Vision Pro or a Meta Quest with newer software, you'll be vaguely familiar with how Moohan works. Indeed, the interactions are consistent and intuitive. You can grab, move, and select items with the headset's accurate hand tracking. With Android XR, you also get access to the apps and services you've come to know from Google. Outside of games and video experiences, content has been a problem on other headsets.

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