The man you're about to meet walked into Facebook in 2006 as its 10th engineer. 20 years later, he's now the chief technology officer of the entire company. He created the first Facebook newsfeed, built the Ads machine that turned Meta into a $1 trillion business from the ground up. And last month, his team just launched Meta's first generation of smartglasses that he claims will change the world as we know it by 2028. This is Andrew Bosworth, but everybody at Meta just calls him Boz. He's the company's chief technology officer and the head of Reality Labs, the division at Meta that has spent more than $60 billion trying to build the next piece of technology that could replace the smartphone.
For the last few years, Boz has been saying the same thing in public to anybody who will listen. He believes the smartphone successor is already here and it lives on your face. And this month, for the first time since Meta launched their new generation of AI glasses designed completely in-house instead of utilizing outside brand partners like Ray-Ban and Oakley. So when Meta invited me to sit down with Boz the week of perhaps the biggest launch of his career, I had exactly one question I wanted to ask him. And it wasn't about smart glasses.
This era, the AI season of Meta. How would you sort of describe it? It's absolute madness. We've never seen a shift like this before. Everything that we had built around is shifting underneath our feet. The next 18 months is going to be absolute chaos.
But before we get to that question, we need to understand who's actually making this bet. So before I flew out, I went back through two decades of his interviews, his blog, and the paper trail that he's left behind. And Boz's story starts earlier than you'd think. Before Facebook existed, Boz was a teaching assistant at Harvard in an artificial intelligence course. One of his students was a sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg. The two of them have been building together for 20 years, since the first thing Boz ever shipped at Facebook was Newsfeed in September 2006, and within a day of launch, hundreds of thousands of users joined groups demanding it to be deleted. There were even real world protests. Zuckerberg had to publish a post that literally opened with the words 'calm down, breathe, we hear you.' They didn't kill the product, but they added controls. They listened and they waited. Today, Newsfeed is just how the internet works. Boz has spent 20 years watching new technology move through that exact cycle from outrage to habit, and I think that history explains his confidence more than any spec sheet does. I keep that cycle in mind. It's the lens for everything you're about to hear. Boz is usually the person in the room asking the hardest question himself. Remember that because you're going to see it happen in this interview.
Tell me about the new line of glasses. First of all, congratulations. They look great. I want to know the tech on board, what's new, but more importantly, it's a proprietary design. I want to know why that was so important to Meta and why you're particularly excited about that.
Yeah, there's still a partnership with Luxottica. They're manufacturing the lenses. It's their distribution. But we want to have glasses for everybody. You can't do that just on the backs of these iconic brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley. Those command a premium. And so if you want to be glasses for everybody, you've got to meet people where they are. The technology that we've put into this is design, technology and bringing a lot more styles. Two people don't want to wear the same glasses. It's an expression of themselves. Marks the disconnect. Last year, the first thing these have to be is great glasses. The technology comes second to that. So for us, building Meta branded, reaching out to a broader audience in terms of the market positioning and having more styles, more colorways that people can choose from so that they feel like the glasses they get fit them. That's the goal of this whole thing.
The frames are only half the launch, though. The other half is the thing living inside them, and I don't have to pretend to be impressed by it, I agree. I mean, it's like a fashion choice. If I'm gonna wear sunglasses, I'm gonna wear my Ray-Ban Meta. And then I would say that the secondary hero feature of the capture technology. Then third is the AI, which I really want to get into. That Meta AI is actually fantastic. We were actually looking for a cafe earlier. We were going through Google, you know, all the different chatbots. Meta AI is the only one that actually nailed it in terms of what we were looking for within like a 0.5 mile radius. And my wife has actually been using it so much to the point that I don't think she can churn because it has all of her contexts. Like honestly, not that you would, but you could charge 200 bucks a month for it, and she would have no choice but to pay it. At this point. It's a big leap that it's taken, I think, over the last four months been phenomenal. So I'm excited to have these on board.
We've been working on these location tools for a long time at Facebook and now Meta, so that the glasses will be able to help you locally navigate. MSL took all the data that we prepared and brought it into the model, and Spark absolutely crushes the local use case for this reason. So now you've nailed it. Like that was a great collab between our teams, local recommendations and e-commerce, you've got two of the top three. The third one that we slated as health, the top three things I think Spark is the best at. And you've got two of them on your own, which is a good sign.
I genuinely love these products. I wear my Meta Ray-Bans fairly often and my wife uses Meta AI as well. The model knows her, her taste, her history, and that context is exactly what makes it useful. It's also exactly what a company has to earn the right to hold. Because I've watched what happens when a company skips that first step. Back in 2013, Google put a camera on people's faces, and the backlash was hostile enough to produce a brand new insult. Glass. Whole bars banned them, theaters banned them. The consumer version was gone within two years. So the history here is worth taking seriously. And to Meta's credit, they have. There's a capture light on the frame now, and if you cover it, the camera simply refuses to record, and that's a real fix. A genuine step past the 2021 Ray-Ban stories, where regulators in Ireland and Italy questioned whether bystanders could even see the light. No company on Earth has spent more time being forced to think about this problem in public than Meta has, but the problem isn't fully solved by them or by anyone. In October 2024, two Harvard students connected a pair of Ray-Ban Metas to a facial recognition engine and started identifying strangers in real time. Meta didn't build that, and Meta couldn't have stopped it. It's a reminder that once a camera lives on a face, no single company controls what gets built around it. And yet the market has already started voting. Over 2 million pairs of Ray-Ban Metas have sold, with production reportedly scaling towards 10 million pairs a year. So the question isn't whether this technology is coming or not. It clearly is. The question is whether we're ready for it and whether Meta can bring everyone along, including the people who've never put the glasses on. Meta wants to own majority market share for this next wave of wearable technology, but so does every other major tech company, which means this next five years of smart eyewear is going to be crowded. So I asked Boz who he's keeping an eye on in this space.
I'm not going to say that the first pioneer is because we had Google Glass and we had sort of iterations in the past, but I think where the next five years are going to get really interesting is everybody is sort of trying to catch up to Meta now. Tech. I think we're going to see a lot of eyewear wearables coming out.
Who would you say? I mean, let's say if Meta's the 26 Knicks, would you say the Spurs are like the one you're worried about most?
Oh, man. You got you got me. Like, listen, it's obviously the dubs. No. What are we doing at Meta? We really have two fundamental beliefs, one of which is we want to bring the technology to everybody. So the only competitors that I worry about are people who are trying to bring the technology to everybody. You got to look at Google. They have a great model. They have a great research team. If they were able to crack tremendous consumer product out of this, I think they're somebody who looked to. I tell my team all the time, mostly when I look at these other these other teams playing, I'm trying to learn from them. I'm trying to say, okay, they took a different path than we took. They made different choices than we would have made. How's it working? What's the market say to that? How do people respond to it? And then we can do better on our side because this is not like software. I can't build a thousand different pairs of glasses every year and just like see what works, you can only build a small number and every one of them counts. So every time somebody else launches something that's different, that's a tremendous value to you to learn from what could be better or worse about your products.
You've been here, I want to say 20 years.
And, you know, I've been following the story of Meta for some time. The shift from web to mobile was a big one. You know, there's been a lot of regulatory battles. You know, you've seen it all. I want to know this era, this sort of season, the AI season of Meta. Is this the most challenging? Is it the most exciting? How would you sort of describe it?
Both. It's absolute madness. We've never seen a shift like this before. It's bigger than the shift of the internet that we came in on. Bigger than the shift in mobile, in my opinion, because it's not just a new modality. Everything about how we work is also changing, which is pretty crazy. So it's so chaotic. Everything that we got comfortable with that we had built around as a stable structure is shifting underneath our feet. The next 18 months is going to be absolute chaos. I couldn't be more excited about where it goes. The 3 to 5 year view on this is unbelievably positive for the world, for people.
Real quick, if you made it this far, you're probably the kind of person who wants to see where technology is headed before it gets there. That's exactly what this channel is built for. Sitting down with the people actually building the future and asking the questions you would want to ask them. I've got some insane guests booked over the next few months with people we've definitely heard of, building the things you're probably already using every day. That sounds like your kind of thing. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. And since Meta smartglasses are what this video is all about, I want to give away a pair of them to three of you watching right now. Entering just takes one step. Hit subscribe and you're in. And one week after this video goes live, I'm going to announce all three winners in a community post right here on the channel. So make sure you turn notifications on to see if you won. All right, now back to Boz.
I know there's a lot of stuff in R&D. Surely you may not be able to reveal anything, but what are you most excited about specifically? Let's say over the next 18 to 24 months?
I've been very lucky. So in my life I have a personal assistant. I have somebody who helps me do things. I'm able to assign whole work to somebody who understands my intentions, what I'm trying to accomplish, that I have kids, that I have a wife, that I have these kinds of constraints, and they make good decisions on my behalf. And I get time back, and that's time I spend with my family. That's like, that's how I spend with my kids. That's time I get to spend on things that matter a lot more, that I'm more uniquely able to do right. Nobody else can spend time with my kids and have that matter. Only I can do that. But this is the work that somebody else can do. But that's cost prohibitive for the vast majority of the population. You can give superpowers to everybody. Last week, we promised to give 180,000 pairs of glasses. Every single blind veteran in America is going to get a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Why? Because it helps them navigate the world, helps them feel independent. Our display glasses have incredible technology for people who are hard of hearing where it can actually live caption the real world as an assistive technology, we understand that, but keep in mind all of people have areas that they have strengths and weaknesses, and people have better memories than other people. Some people have faster cognition than other people. Vision and hearing aren't the only disciplines upon which humans live on this normal curve. I think we're going to give superpowers to every person. Superhuman memory. Superhuman hearing. Superhuman vision so that they have the ability to be maximized and what they are capable of uniquely. When we talk about personal superintelligence, it's not just that the intelligence is personalized and is understanding you personally. That's part of it. It's also that you're maximizing what your unique offering is in the world. The glasses are such a key part of that. The hard part about using AI today actually isn't the AI not being smart enough. It's actually getting all the context of the world that you're living in to the AI. Any information that comes to your face right now, if you want it to go to your computer, you have to take your phone out. Type yourself a message. These glasses make it so much easier for you to maximize the power of what AI can do for you, and then also to close the loop and get information back to you. That's timely. That's critical to you to maximize your ability to achieve your goals in the real world.
And when Boz says hardware is unforgiving, he's earned the right to say that. In 2013, he helped lead Facebook Home, Meta's first real shot at owning a phone. Within a month, the carrier had cut the price from $99 to $0.99, and within a year it was gone. He shipped the misses too, and you can hear it in how he builds now. So when I asked Boz what has him most excited about the next two years, I expected a product focused answer. But what I got instead started with the most human thing imaginable: his own calendar. Being able to spend more time with his family, and hoping that the tech allows others to do the same. On top of that, Meta's mission to help veterans get access to this technology is truly respectable. 180,000 pairs of smart glasses is not a press release number. You get to quietly walk back. It's specific, verifiable and shipping out this year. But go back and listen to that sentence buried in the middle of that answer. The hard part about using AI today actually isn't the AI not being smart enough. It's actually getting all the context of the world that you're living in to the AI. Depending on the day, that sentence sounds like a life changing assistant or a camera on millions of people's faces. And the truthful answer is that it's both. Which brings me to the piece of hardware I think is the most underrated product in tech right now. The neural band. Now, here's what happens when you actually put it on. Every time you decide to move a finger, your brain fires that command down your arm as an electrical signal, and the band reads it at the wrist before the movement fully happens. In a real sense, it knows what your fingers intend to do before they finish doing it. It's the first neural interface most people will ever own, and it's shipping inside Meta Ray-Ban display glasses today.
I have the displays and if they had cellular connectivity, I mean, I tell anybody I could actually leave the house now comfortably without bringing my phone. I'm assuming that's coming, but the question here is the neural band. First of all, it feels like magic. When I demo these to people, it's like one of the holy crap moments that you get once every five years in tech. When you look at the future of the smart glasses, is that going to play a major central role, or will that be only for like sort of the premium top end devices?
