In both public and private, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg extols the future of AR even while staff worry about him getting in bed with Trump.

© Photo: Meta

Would you buy a pair of expensive, true AR glasses from Meta knowing you would also support CEO and extoller of “masculine energy” Mark Zuckerberg? Advanced AI glasses are one of the main subjects on his mind, according to both his public statements to investors and a leaked memo of an internal all-hands meeting. Beneath the hyperbole and increasingly right-wing inflection of Zuck’s public statements, Meta CEO is riding high on AI and his leading performance with the company’s smart glasses.

Zuckerberg told investors during the company’s fourth quarterly results call Wednesday that its Ray-Ban Meta glasses were “a real hit.” He speculated that “this will be a defining year that determines if we’re on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses.” This comes after a Bloomberg report this month claimed Meta is working on a pair of Oakley-style AR glasses for athletes. The company is also reportedly working on a follow-up to the Ray-Ban Meta, codenamed Hypernova, which includes a heads-up display.

“Billions” sounds like a pie-in-the-sky dream, though the company’s AI glasses have reportedly been doing well. Leaked memos signed by Meta’s head of its Reality Labs division, Andrew Bosworth, indicate that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Meta Quest 3s were a hit last year. Business Insider reported that the group developing the company’s VR and AR technologies beat all product sales and user targets in 2024. According to the leaked memo, sales grew by 40% year over year.

That doesn’t mean that Meta’s Reality Labs division isn’t still burning money, just as it did when the word “metaverse” was still being bandied around. The company reported close to $5 billion in Reality Labs losses in the fourth quarter. Meta’s AR division made only $1.1 billion in sales during that same time. The difference between then and now is that Zuckerberg sees a new market opening with augmented reality and AI glasses. In a leaked transcript of an internal all-hands reported by The Verge late Thursday, the Meta CEO said there was a “wide open field” for them to leverage its current and future AI glasses.

Despite his statements, Zuck’s glasses aren’t the only game in town. CES 2025 was inundated with smart glasses of all shapes and sizes. Samsung and Apple are also working on their own smart glasses. Meta certainly has a head start, but that doesn’t mean it’s a shoo-in to win the long race.

Zuck Refuses to Talk to Staff About his Hate of DEI and Love for Donald Trump

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. © Julia Demaree Nikhinson – Pool/Getty Images

Standing in Zuck’s way may be Zuck himself. According to recent reports, his “mask-off” moment, in which he decried DEI and replaced fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram with a community notes-like feature, hasn’t resulted in the loss of too many global users. Still, the leaked transcript from the company’s all-hands showed that many employees were more than a little concerned about how chummy he was getting with President Donald Trump and his ramping-up anti-trans hate crusade. Musk refused to speak to staff about any of those concerns.

Instead, Musk said, “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government.” This was after Meta already made its Llama AI available to U.S. government agencies.

Zuckerberg told investors he planned to invest “billions of dollars” in AI infrastructure over the coming years. That starts with $65 billion in AI and a 2GW data center incorporating more than 1.3 million of Nvidia’s graphics processing chips. Zuckerberg, along with every other big U.S. tech firm, is trying to ignore DeepSeek, which released a model practically as capable as its latest and greatest without relying on such obtuse data processing.

Zuckerberg ended his internal meeting by telling employees to “buckle up.” It expects to lay off employees the company considers “low-performers.” He told staff that “rip[ping] the band-aid off” was “a nicer thing to do for people who are probably going to end up making it anyway.” With comments like that, is it surprising that staff are leaking these meetings? Not-so-ironically, The Verge reported on more leaked internal communications saying Meta was looking to fire the leakers.