Meta is asking the public to judge it on what it builds next rather than what it has done before. The company's latest product cycle, a pair of AI-powered smart glasses and a personal AI agent called Muse, represents its third attempt at defining the next computing platform after social media and the metaverse. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether people can separate the technology from the company behind it.
The Metaverse Ledger
Meta's Reality Labs division has accumulated more than $80 billion in operating losses since the company rebranded from Facebook in 2021. The division cut roughly 10 percent of its staff at the start of 2026, shuttered three VR studios, discontinued the metaverse-for-work initiative, and initially announced it would shut down Horizon Worlds on VR headsets before reversing course after public backlash. The metaverse pivot, which Zuckerberg framed as the future of the internet, has not generated the returns the company needed.
But the spending was not entirely wasted. The VR infrastructure and hardware expertise fed directly into Meta's smart glasses program, which is now the company's most credible hardware success. Analysts at IDC and Moor Insights & Strategy both credit the early VR investments with giving Meta the supply chain relationships and engineering capacity to move quickly when the glasses market started gaining traction.
Smart Glasses Momentum
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses sold roughly 2 million units after launch in 2023, surprising even Zuckerberg. EssilorLuxottica sold an additional 7 million units by the end of 2025, and smart glasses sales doubled in Q2 of 2026. According to IDC, Meta holds 69.2 percent of the smart glasses and headset market as of Q2 2026, and 76 percent of AI glasses without displays.
The numbers are strong, but the profitability question remains open. IDC research director Jitesh Ubrani says no company in the XR space is likely to see a return on investment within five years, and that the timeline could stretch to 25. The prize is not immediate revenue but influence over what becomes the next mobile computing platform. Meta's strategy is to spend whatever it takes to own the category before competitors can establish a foothold.
Google is pushing its Android XR platform with Samsung. Apple is reportedly working on its own glasses. Dozens of smaller manufacturers are shipping Ray-Ban-style devices. The market is moving because Meta is funding the infrastructure, even if Meta itself is not yet profiting from it.
The Privacy Problem
Meta's dominance in smart glasses has attracted the kind of attention the company does not want. The devices have been adopted by pickup artists and pranksters who use them to record women and retail workers without consent, earning the glasses the label "pervert glasses" online. Activists in major cities have launched guerrilla campaigns remixing Meta's own marketing to frame glasses users as privacy threats.
The backlash feeds into a decade of privacy concerns around Meta's core business: indiscriminate data collection, breaches, and advertising practices that have made the company synonymous with privacy violations in the public mind. Meta has responded with reactive policy changes. The company made it harder to disable the LED indicator that shows when the glasses are recording, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri said prank videos captured with the glasses will be taken down.
But a New York Times report revealed that Meta intended to launch facial recognition software during political unrest, and a Wired report confirmed that Meta had shipped but not activated facial recognition technology to millions of glasses. A Financial Times report said Meta is developing "super sensing glasses" capable of continuous environmental monitoring. Each report reinforces the perception that Meta is building surveillance infrastructure and will activate it when the时机 is right.
Muse and the AI Race
Zuckerberg offered packages running up to $1 billion to recruit top AI talent into Meta's Superintelligence Labs. More than a year later, the company's most visible output is Muse, a personal AI agent released in early September. Early numbers are promising: Apptopia estimates over 600,000 daily active users in the US, and the app shot to the top of the iOS App Store charts. Meta's stock climbed 11 percent on Monday.
But sources at or close to the company told The Verge that morale is down, AI initiatives are scattered, and the company is still struggling to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on model quality. Muse is the latest in a pattern of Meta identifying the right market moment and shipping a product quickly, even if the underlying technology is not best-in-class. The question is whether distribution advantage, the massive install base of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, can compensate for technical gaps.
Muse also launched into immediate controversy. Amazon blocked the app from accessing its e-commerce platform, claiming Meta never obtained permission. Security researcher Patrick Wardle disclosed a zero-day vulnerability that let attackers control the agent through an undocumented settings flag, which Meta patched within hours. The pattern mirrors Meta's history: ship fast, deal with the consequences later.
Zuckerberg's Operating Model
The through line across Meta's two-decade history is Zuckerberg's willingness to chase the next big thing while the current one is still being contested. Facebook's early motto was "Move fast and break things." The company's actual operating principle has been closer to: move fast, break things, move on. The metaverse was supposed to be the future until it was not. Now AI glasses and Muse are the future, and the metaverse is a cautionary tale about what happens when the next big thing does not materialize on schedule.
Analysts say this is both Meta's strength and its vulnerability. Zuckerberg's unilateral control means the company can pivot quickly and commit resources at a scale that consensus-driven organizations cannot match. But it also means the company's direction is shaped by one person's judgment about what matters, and that judgment has been wrong before. The $80 billion Reality Labs losses are the price of that赌注. The smart glasses and Muse are the next one. Whether Meta can convince the public to forget how it got here, and focus on where it is going, is the question that will define the next phase of the company.