Thoughts on Meta Connect 2025

I bought my first Meta Ray-Ban Glasses back in 2023. After using it for a few days, I reviewed my initial thoughts here. For almost the last two years, I have been a Daily Active User (DAU) of these glasses. In fact, after losing a pair early this year, I could survive only 48 hours without them and then went to a nearby Ray-Ban store to buy a new pair.

What do I mostly use my glasses for? Since I intend to hit 10k steps everyday, I try to take all my calls with my glasses during my walk. I use my glasses to listen to all my podcasts and earnings calls. Of course, I could use Airpods for these as well, but it’s more convenient to be able to pause or change volume. The fact that I live in California also helps since I probably should wear a sunglass while walking under California sun during most of the year anyway.

These glasses are particularly handy for being present while taking photos or videos of my 9-month old son.

You know what I’m not quite using these glasses for yet? AI.

While Meta seems hell bent on calling these glasses “AI glasses”, my interaction with “Meta AI” using these glasses have often been hit or miss. It is this particular reason I may be less charitable about Meta’s demo failures for its “Meta Ray-Ban Display” launch (see here, and here) in yesterday’s Connect keynote. Tech companies understand the risk of these live demos and hence mostly show pre-recorded videos to precisely avoid these mishaps. While I can appreciate Meta willing to take such risks, my bigger concern is to what extent these failures were indeed emblematic of actual consumer experience. Having tried Meta AI through the glasses, I can tell you these “mishaps” are not super rare.

While the demo failures did get plenty of attention, the product itself is super cool. These ads give you a sense of the experience. One demo that did work was “live subtitle” and you can even get the subtitles in your own language while the other person can speak in a different language. Traveling or living in a different country can be a fundamentally different experience in just a couple of years! But I would like to reserve my judgment before I can actually try the glass myself.

Interestingly, while I could buy the earlier Meta Ray-Ban glasses directly on the website, “Meta Ray-Ban Display” requires you to schedule a demo first. I will get a demo in a nearby store on October 2. I will report back what I think of the glasses after the demo.

While glasses were the highlight of this year’s Connect, Meta also talked about making it easier to create virtual worlds (thanks to AI) to propel VR adoption. I have a Quest 3 headset and while I used to be DAU in playing Cricket in VR, I barely touched my headset since my son was born. Perhaps more importantly, during my nearly two years of playing Cricket in VR, I didn’t find anything else that I would like to do on a recurring basis with my VR headset. Meta may want to be patient with VR, especially given AI can indeed make it trivial to create 3D content but it’s hard to deny VR’s adoption has been a huge disappointment so far for Meta.

I do think the clock should be ticking for VR. I suspect Meta may be losing ~$8-10 Billion per year on their investments in VR and given the lack of momentum here since 2021, I think the investments may need to be scaled down materially to ~$1-2 Billion losses in VR if even AI cannot change the direction noticeably in a couple of years. The glasses indeed seem much more promising and I am fine with Meta investing $10-15 Billion/year here for another 3-4 years as they perfect the form factor and technology over time.

Every Connect Keynote feels like a referendum to me on the question of Meta’s Reality Labs losses. While it may be non-sensical to capitalize these losses in valuing Meta, this year’s Connect wasn’t super inspiring to think these losses are going to change direction soon.

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