By Mathew in AI Applications — 16 Mar 2025

Imagen-AR Revolution: Mark Zuckerberg Unveils Meta's Orion Glasses and AI Vision

Key Points

Mark Zuckerberg unveils Orion, Meta's first full holographic augmented reality glasses after 10 years of development
Meta envisions multiple product lines: display-less glasses (Ray-Ban Meta), heads-up displays, full holographic AR (Orion), and mixed reality headsets
Zuckerberg identifies two primary values in Meta's vision: creating a sense of 'presence' in digital interactions and developing personalized AI
Meta's open source approach to AI (Llama models) contrasts with competitors' centralized systems, with Zuckerberg arguing open source leads to safer, more secure technology
Despite advances in digital connection, Zuckerberg acknowledges physical presence remains special, with haptics being a challenging frontier
Meta is betting heavily on AI scaling continuing to advance, investing hundreds of billions in infrastructure
The future of social media will likely include AI-generated content, AI versions of creators, and more personalized experiences

Introduction: Glimpsing the Metaverse

In the first episode of "Huge Conversations," a series dedicated to exploring optimistic technological futures, host Dylan Taylor sits down with one of the most influential figures in tech today: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. With nearly half the world's population using Meta products, Zuckerberg's vision for the future could profoundly shape how billions of people live, work, and connect.

The conversation begins with Zuckerberg showcasing Meta's latest breakthrough: Orion glasses, the culmination of a decade of research and development. These AR glasses represent what Zuckerberg believes will be the next major computing platform after smartphones.

The Tony Stark Glasses: A Decade in the Making

The interview begins with Zuckerberg proudly presenting what his team calls "the real-life Tony Stark glasses" – Orion, Meta's first full holographic augmented reality glasses.

"These are the first full holographic augmented reality glasses I think that exist in the world," Zuckerberg explains. "This is the culmination of 10 years of research and development that we've done to basically miniaturize all the computing that you need to have glasses – not a headset, but glasses – that can put full holograms into the world with a wide field of view."

He envisions a future where conversations might happen with one person physically present and another appearing as a full-body hologram. Users could interact with digital objects in physical space – playing games, working together, or engaging in activities like poker or chess with holographic cards and boards.

The technical achievement is remarkable. Zuckerberg details how every millimeter of the glasses contains sophisticated technology: micro-projectors shooting light into waveguides with nano-etchings that create holograms, eye-tracking cameras, computing components, batteries, microphones, speakers, and sensors that help place digital objects correctly in physical space.

"When I told the team that we were going to do this 10 years ago, people weren't sure if we were going to be able to," Zuckerberg admits. "But I think not only were we able to do this, but I think we're going to be able to get it cheaper and higher quality and even smaller and more stylish over time."

The AR Landscape: Multiple Paths Forward

Taylor asks Zuckerberg to help organize the landscape of AR and VR technologies for viewers, from heads-up displays to full headsets like Quest and Apple Vision Pro.

Zuckerberg explains that when Meta began this journey a decade ago, he thought something like Orion would ultimately be the product for everyone. However, along the way, they've discovered that multiple approaches will likely coexist as permanent product lines:

Display-less glasses (like Ray-Ban Meta): Stylish glasses with embedded technology but no display, optimized for AI interaction through voice.
Heads-up displays: Glasses with smaller field of view (20-30 degrees vs. Orion's 70 degrees), ideal for notifications, texting, directions, and information lookup.
Full holographic AR (like Orion): Premium glasses capable of placing convincing holograms in physical space.
Full headsets (like Quest): Will continue to exist because they can accommodate more computing power than glasses.

"Fundamentally our mission is not to build something that is advanced and only a few people can use," Zuckerberg emphasizes. "We want to take it the last mile and do all the innovation to get it to everyone."

He points to the recently announced Quest 3S, which delivers high-quality mixed reality for $299, compared to competitors' much higher prices.

Two Pillars: Presence and Personalized Intelligence

When asked to describe the future if everything goes according to Meta's "wildest dreams," Zuckerberg identifies two primary values the company is trying to deliver:

1. Presence: "There's something that I think is just really deep about being physically present with another person that you don't get from any other technology today," Zuckerberg explains. "When people have a very visceral reaction to experiencing virtual or mixed reality, what they're really reacting to is that they actually, for the first time with technology, feel a sense of presence like they're in a place with the person. That's super powerful."

2. Personalized AI: "Where this is going to get really compelling is when it's personalized for you, and in order for it to be personalized for you, it has to have context and understand what's going on in your life." Glasses, he argues, are the ideal form factor for this because they can "see what you see and hear what you hear," providing AI with crucial context.

The Limits of Digital Presence: Missing the Human Touch

Taylor reflects on how technology has already improved his ability to connect with distant family members, expressing optimism about a future where he could "lose in Scrabble to my mom and feel like she's really there." But he also wonders about the irreplaceable aspects of physical presence: "I miss hugging my mom."

Zuckerberg acknowledges this limitation, noting that eye contact will be much easier to replicate than touch. For haptics (the sense of touch), he believes progress will come gradually, starting with hands:

"If you draw out the kind of homunculus version of a person in terms of what we're sensing, it's hands," he explains. "I think being able to do that for your hands is probably the most important place to start."

He describes a ping-pong demo where controllers provide feedback when a digital ball hits the paddle, creating a convincing sensation. However, he admits that some physical interactions will remain challenging to replicate:

"We can kind of do a good approximation of boxing today... but it would be hard to do a virtual reality version of jiu-jitsu where you're grappling with someone and you need real force feedback. That's probably the hardest thing to go do, but I think we'll get there."

Zuckerberg also mentions that smell – disproportionately important for memories – isn't something they'll likely incorporate into devices in the next few years.

When asked what aspect of presence technology he finds most interesting, Zuckerberg explains that creating a sense of presence is less about any single feature and more about avoiding things that break the illusion:

"More than any one thing that provides a sense of presence, it's actually more the case that any one thing done wrong breaks the sense of presence," he says. Issues like limited field of view, latency, or unrealistic physics can shatter the illusion.

Interestingly, he notes that people can accept certain inconsistencies – like photorealistic avatars in cartoonish worlds or vice versa – as long as the avatar's movements feel authentic to the person it represents.

The Friendship Paradox: Technology and Human Connection

Taylor brings up a concerning trend: despite our increasingly connected world, the average American has fewer friends now than 15 years ago. Time spent socializing in person has dropped by nearly 30% for adults and almost 70% for young people aged 15-24. The number of Americans reporting no close friends has jumped from 3% to 12% in the last three decades.

"It feels to me like with all the tools that we've built for human connection, we're struggling to connect," Taylor observes.

Zuckerberg acknowledges the complexity of the issue, noting that many of these trends predate modern technology. He argues that Meta's technologies aren't replacing better physical connections but rather addressing an unmet need:

"People already don't have as much connection as they would like to have. It's not like this is replacing some sort of better physical connection that they would have otherwise had. It's that the average person would like to have 10 friends and they have two or three, and there's just more demand to socialize than what people are able to do given the current construct."

He suggests that technologies like AR glasses won't reduce time spent with physically present loved ones but will increase time spent with distant connections: "If I have glasses, it's not going to make it that I spend less time with my wife; it's going to make it so that I spend more time with my sister who lives across the country."

AI and the Future of Learning: When Is Struggle Valuable?

The conversation shifts to how AI might change learning and development. Taylor notes that some AI applications, like real-time translation, clearly unlock human potential by removing barriers. But in other cases, particularly in education, the struggle itself might be valuable – like building a muscle.

Zuckerberg reflects on this balance, using the example of helping children articulate their emotions:

"I think we're always going to find new things to struggle with," he says. "Having a tool that can help you communicate better isn't going to mean that we perfectly understand every [emotion]... you can always get better at communicating with other people and expressing yourself and understanding other people."

He draws a parallel to coding, where each generation has moved to higher levels of abstraction. While kids in the future might be able to create complex software simply by describing what they want, they'll still face creative challenges: "These things are not exactly what I want them to be, so now I need to go back and edit them... I think there's always more to do."

When asked how he'd want his own children to use AI when they reach high school, Zuckerberg emphasizes that some fundamental skills remain important:

"I think that there's some things that you need to be able to do yourself," he says. "Should we still teach our kids to program computers even though you're going to have these tools in the future that are just so much more powerful? I think the answer to that is probably yes because teaching someone how to code is teaching them a way to think rigorously... I think it's going to just make you generally a better thinker and better person."

Taylor asks how AI might transform social media platforms. Zuckerberg notes that social media has already evolved from primarily friend-based interactions to at least half of content coming from creators or sources users don't personally know – a trend AI will likely accelerate.

He envisions several ways AI will transform social platforms:

Enhanced creation tools: "Your friends will create funnier memes and more interesting content... maybe your friends have glasses and they capture a bunch of stuff, and before they might not have been able to edit it to make it interesting, or maybe it was just too much work, or they didn't even realize that they captured something amazing, but now the AI is like, 'Hey, I made this thing for you out of your content.'"
AI creators and AI versions of human creators: "If you're a creator, one of the big challenges is there are only so many hours in the day, and your community probably has a nearly unlimited demand to interact with you... If we can make it so that each creator can basically make an AI artifact that their community can interact with – people be clear it's not the actual creator themselves – but it's almost like a piece of digital art that you're producing."
Personalized AI-generated content: "Maybe in the future there will be content that is purely generated by AI by the system personalized for you, maybe it's summarizing things that are out there that are going to be interesting, maybe it's just producing something funny that makes you laugh."

Zuckerberg compares AI's impact to the internet itself: "It's kind of like the internet in a way, where it's probably going to change almost every field and almost every feature of every application that we use. It seems sort of hyperbolic to say that, but I do think that's true."

Open Source AI: The Safety Debate

Taylor asks Zuckerberg to explain the ongoing debate about open source AI for a general audience. Zuckerberg contrasts Meta's approach with competitors like OpenAI and Google:

"OpenAI, Google – they're building an AI, like one AI... they think you're going to use Gemini or ChatGPT for all the different things that you want to interact with. At a high level, that's just not how I think the world is going to go. I think we're going to have a lot of different AI systems, just like we have a lot of different apps."

He predicts that in the future, every business will have its own AI to interact with customers, just as they have websites and social media accounts today. The question becomes: "Do you want a future that's fundamentally very concentrated, where you're interacting with one system for everything, or do you want one where a lot of different people are building a lot of different AIs?"

On the safety debate, Zuckerberg acknowledges the concern that open-sourcing models could enable bad actors but argues that history suggests the opposite outcome:

"Historically, I think what we've seen with open source is actually the opposite... open source software is safer and more secure largely because you put it out there, more people can scrutinize it because they can see all parts of the system."

He explains that while people initially feared that making software open would expose security holes for exploitation, the reality has been that "by adding more scrutiny to the systems, the holes became apparent quicker and then were fixed."

The Big Question: How Far Will AI Scale?

When asked about the biggest open question on his mind, Zuckerberg points to AI scaling:

"There's a current set of methods that seem to be scaling very well," he explains. "With past AI architecture, you could feed an AI system a certain amount of data and use a certain amount of compute, but eventually it hit a plateau. One of the interesting things about these new transformer-based architectures over the last 5 to 10 years is that we haven't found the end yet."

This leads to a critical strategic question for Meta: how much to invest in infrastructure for future AI models. Zuckerberg notes they're planning massive scaling from Llama 3 (trained on 10-20,000 GPUs) to Llama 4 (over 100,000 GPUs) and beyond.

"It's totally possible that at some point we just hit a limit, and just like previous systems, there's an asymptote and it doesn't keep growing," he acknowledges. "But it's also possible that that limit is not going to happen anytime soon... and that's a really big and high-stakes question for the company because we're basically making these bets on how much infrastructure to build out for the future. This is like hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure."

Zuckerberg's bet is that AI will continue scaling and advancing for quite a while, leading to both compelling new products and a dynamic technology landscape over a 20-year period.

Conclusion: Navigating an Accelerating Future

Throughout the conversation, Zuckerberg presents a vision of the future that balances technological optimism with pragmatic considerations about human needs and limitations. While acknowledging concerns about the pace of change, he encourages curiosity and engagement rather than resistance.

"I don't think this is like going from zero to one," he says about the coming changes. "It's not like everything's just kind of been normal, and now it's about to change. The technology evolves over time, and the opportunities that we have evolve and improve."

His advice for those concerned about keeping up: "The people who do well are people who are generally curious about it and dig in and try to use it to live better lives rather than the people who try to fight it in some way."

As Meta continues developing technologies that could reshape how billions of people connect, work, and experience the world, Zuckerberg's vision offers a glimpse into a future where digital and physical reality become increasingly interwoven – with all the promise and challenges that entails.

For the full conversation, watch the video here.