Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg Details Plan for New AI to Have Data on 'Everything That is Going on in the Person’s Life' Through Big Glasses Push

During Meta Platforms' (META) second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the notable and somewhat uncharacteristic position the company is taking in the artificial intelligence (AI) race. Zuckerberg used the moment to argue that the industry is moving in the wrong direction.

“We’re the only major company building AI with the primary goal of putting superintelligence directly into people’s hands,” he told analysts on July 29. “Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we are focused on distributing it widely and giving everyone the ability to direct it towards what matters to them.”

The comments arrived in the closing stretch of his prepared remarks, shortly after the CEO mentioned publishing an op-ed explaining why he is optimistic about the future. Zuckerberg tied the argument back to Meta’s history: “At Meta, we have always built technology to put power in people’s hands, so that they can connect with the people they care about and shape the world in the ways that they want. It’s why we’ve always focused on making our products affordable and accessible for everyone.”

He closed by making the business case and the moral case one and the same. “That’s the way that society has always made progress," he said. "I think that these are the right values for building a positive AI future, and if we help build this, then I think that we will continue to build a very strong business as well.”

The claim deserves to be read as exactly that: a claim. Every frontier AI lab describes its mission in terms of broad human benefit, and Meta’s rivals would contest the idea that the company alone is distributing rather than concentrating AI capabilities. The word doing the work in Zuckerberg’s statement is “centralizing,” a description of the model in which the most capable systems remain inside a company and are accessed through that company’s services. Meta’s position is that the capability should sit closer to the user.

Earlier in the call, however, Meta offered less than the rhetoric might imply. Zuckerberg described Meta’s newest model, Muse Spark 1.1, as “available through our new public API,” and said Meta is “ramping up distribution through partner channels and more coding agents over the coming weeks.” An API is a distribution channel, but it is not the same thing as handing someone a model. Zuckerberg did not detail the release terms for the newer models during the call.

The argument has more substance when it comes to hardware and on-device AI. Zuckerberg described glasses as “the ideal form factor” for interacting with personal superintelligence. He said that Meta’s glasses “remain one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics of all time,” and pointed to a new line made with EssilorLuxottica (ESLOF) — including a style designed with Kylie Jenner — as the first to ship with Muse Spark “out of the box.”

Early sales have reportedly exceeded expectations. Zuckerberg also said that Meta launched an incognito mode on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, “allowing people to have private conversations with their assistant that even Meta can’t see.” That is a claim about Meta’s own systems that has not yet been independently verified.

Still, Meta’s glasses have seen surprising success. Hundreds of companies in recent years have attempted to create the device that comes after the smartphone. Whether described as a computing platform or a new “form factor,” it remains one of the largest graveyards in technology.

Meta itself spent billions trying to make the metaverse and virtual reality commonplace. While the company saw some top-line success, the effort also cost it billions of dollars. The technology and lessons learned from that investment have seemingly begun to pay off through the success of Meta’s glasses, although it is still far too early to know whether that success will last.

The version of this future that Zuckerberg seems most interested in is personal rather than institutional. When asked by Bank of America’s Justin Post about how Meta’s AI lab is performing a year after hiring its leadership, Zuckerberg said the following: “I’m quite happy with the trajectory that we’re on. We’ve released a few models that I think are quite impressive on our early scaling ladder.”

The CEO then described what personal superintelligence would actually require — “having a very clear mental model of everything that is going on in the person’s life and their goals is going to be a very important aspect of that.”

That sentence is worth sitting with because it states the strategy without decoration. The company arguing most forcefully that AI should be personal rather than centralized is also arguing that personal AI needs a clear model of everything happening in a person’s life. That model would be built by a company whose core business depends on understanding what people are interested in.

Zuckerberg presented that history as an advantage, noting that “certain companies start with different advantages in different markets.”

For investors, the philosophy matters mainly because it explains the spending. Meta is pouring capital into infrastructure based on the theory that widely distributed AI will become enormously valuable, and that Meta’s 3.6 billion daily users across its apps provide the distribution network.

Shareholders sold META stock following the report, largely because of the cost of that theory. Zuckerberg’s answer, in effect, is that Meta’s values and its potential returns point in the same direction. However, the company’s track record outside social media does not always stand up to scrutiny in that regard.