Can you forget how you feel about Meta?
The Verge Mia Sato
Meta spent years chasing the metaverse, and now it’s betting on AI glasses instead. That pivot matters because the company’s biggest wins still come with privacy baggage.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Mia Sato — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Mark Zuckerberg has a habit of moving on before the last bet has paid off. That came through in 2021, when he was publicly defending Facebook over child safety concerns while privately telling a reader on WhatsApp that the metaverse was taking up more of his attention. Weeks later, Facebook became Meta. The message was simple: the next big thing had arrived, and the old one could wait.
That pattern is still running the company. Meta poured money into virtual reality and the metaverse, then spent more than $80 billion in operating losses through Reality Labs. This year it cut roughly 10 percent of that division, shut three VR studios, ended the metaverse for work, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Worlds on VR headsets before backing away after backlash. The VR dream never turned into the future Zuckerberg promised.
But the whole effort was not just a write-off. Meta has found real momentum in smart glasses, especially the Ray-Ban Meta line. The earlier Ray-Ban Stories flopped so badly that 90 percent of owners left them in drawers. The next version, helped by better cameras, sold about 2 million units. By the end of 2025, EssilorLuxottica said it had sold another 7 million units, and Meta and EssilorLuxottica said smart glasses sales doubled in Q2 of 2026. Apptopia estimated Muse, Meta’s new personal AI agent, had more than 600,000 daily active users in the US and had climbed to the top of the iOS App Store charts.
That is why Meta is now trying to sell these devices as AI glasses, not just camera glasses. Zuckerberg has argued that people without glasses that can interact with AI could be at a cognitive disadvantage. The pitch is obvious: wear the computer, don’t open the app. And if that sounds like the next platform battle, Meta is already acting like it intends to win it.
The problem is that Meta keeps dragging its own reputation into the room. The glasses have already been used by pranksters and pickup artists to harass people, feeding the ugly “pervert glasses” label. Privacy groups have pushed back, while reports from the New York Times, Wired, and the Financial Times have only deepened the suspicion that Meta is making surveillance easier, not safer. The company has started reacting — harder-to-disable recording lights, takedowns of prank videos — but that looks more like damage control than trust-building.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Meta’s real product is not glasses or AI; it’s momentum. That works until the public decides the company’s next brilliant bet is just the last one with a nicer frame. The awkward part is that Silicon Valley keeps rewarding the same move: break trust, then call it a platform shift.
Read more about this at: The Verge
