The kinds of devices Meta wants to make next

When I recently met with Meta’s top executives, I wanted to know about more than the company’s first AR glasses, Orion.

In the weeks leading up to our meeting, reports had surfaced about new devices the company’s hardware division, Reality Labs, was working on, from camera earbuds to mixed reality goggles. I had also been hearing rumors of tinkering on new variations of AI-enabled wearables. During my interview with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth just before this year’s Connect conference, we discussed not only some of these possible future products but also how Meta approaches hardware development in general, which I haven’t seen the company explain publicly before.

“If there’s a concept that you could imagine, we either have had or do have somebody building a thing around it,” Bosworth told me. He described a multiphase development process for how Reality Labs takes products from inception to shipping. First, there’s a “pre-discovery team” that is “prototyping the craziest stuff.” They put a “proof of experience” together, and then, after executive review, a “small number” of these concepts graduate to what Meta calls its “discovery” phase, where a product is assigned “a few” dedicated employees to examine what the industrial design would be, along with other factors like cost.

Then, a device enters prototyping, where there are “maybe 10 times more people involved” to build hardware and software that works together. After successfully going through prototyping, a device gets onto the official product roadmap. At that point, “we’ve got a full team assigned to it and the presumptive plan is to ship it.” Roughly half of the devices that get through prototyping go to the final “engineering validation test” phase, which determines whether management kills or greenlights a product to be manufactured at scale and released. According to Bosworth, “about half” of what gets through final validation testing actually ships publicly.

He acknowledged that, somewhere early in this process, the company is tinkering with the idea of earbuds with cameras, which would presumably be used to sense the world around the wearer to aid the usefulness of the Meta AI assistant. (“We know Apple’s doing a thing there,” too, he mentioned.) He also confirmed The Information’s reporting that there is work underway on a pair of steampunk-like goggles for mixed reality. They recently moved from prediscovery to the discovery phase.

He also confirmed a recent internal decision to abandon a higher-end Quest headset codenamed La Jolla, which was slated to arrive around 2027. I reported last year that the goal was to “make it higher resolution for work use.” But Meta decided to not release La Jolla after the tepid reaction to the Quest Pro. Though Bosworth didn’t acknowledge it, I have to imagine that the weak response to Apple’s Vision Pro also played a factor in the decision.

When Meta was still called Facebook and just getting into consumer hardware, it wasn’t developing so many different products at once. Now, with the Quest line of headsets more established and its smart glasses with Ray-Ban seeing early traction, Meta seems to be thinking aggressively about what kinds of new AI-powered devices it could build next.

“We definitely don’t want to be outflanked by someone who came up with some clever, integrated wearable that we hadn’t thought about,” Bosworth said. “If there’s a part of your body that could potentially host a wearable that could do AI, there’s a good chance we’ve had a team run that down.”

In addition to my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg about his vision for AR and smart glasses, I also spoke with Bosworth about the company’s new 10-year deal with EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban.

The idea for the partnership going forward, according to Bosworth, is that Meta’s “technology is just one of the components that can be in any glasses that they design. That’s what we want to have happen.”

Though it hasn’t been announced yet, here’s how he described the rationale for Meta’s plan to buy a noncontrolling stake in the eyewear giant: “They want the margin. We want the volume. That’s the tension, and we found a good solution to it, so we’re pretty excited about it.”

“I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman.” – Geoffrey Hinton referring to Ilya Sutskever while accepting the Nobel Prize in physics.

In a follow-up Q&A: “OpenAI was set up with a big emphasis on safety… Over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that’s unfortunate.”

Some interesting tech career moves you may have missed lately:

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