About Christopher Cox
At Meta’s Connect conference in September 2024, Cox unveiled the Orion augmented reality glasses prototype, which he described as “the most advanced pair of glasses ever made.” He said the glasses project a holographic display and allow users to make eye contact, summon a screen, watch video, and have video calls. Cox stated that Meta has been investing in the technology to explore “what comes after the smartphone” and that the same business model used for smartphones applies to the device category. He also announced Meta AI Voice, a feature that lets users talk to Meta’s AI assistant, and noted that over 400 million downloads have integrated with the company’s AI tools.
In earlier appearances, Cox discussed Meta’s approach to AI and the metaverse. At Bloomberg Tech in May 2024, he said the company open-sourced its LLaMA large language model and argued that open source benefits a large number of people, while acknowledging that as investment levels increase, “there just needs to be more scrutiny on open source.” During a January 2023 Senate hearing, Cox stated that it is “sometimes appropriate to be in contact with government and with government organizations” and that balancing free expression with public safety is a difficult issue the company is committed to working on with outside experts. He has also described the metaverse as “the next version of the internet that gets less flat” and said Meta is developing hardware and operating systems because “this stuff doesn’t exist in the world.”
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Christopher Cox's recent appearances.
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Transcript (11 segments)
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Narrator0:11
Welcome back. Meta hitting a record high today. That's after today's Meta Connect developer conference where the company announced its long-awaited AR glasses prototype along with a new VR headset and AI features. Joining us for a rare and exclusive interview is Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, along with our own Julia Boorstin. Julia?
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Julia Boorstin0:30
Morgan, thanks so much. Chris, thank you so much for being with us today. You've been with Facebook since the very beginning, the very early days. And today we just saw the unveiling of the most futuristic technology Meta has ever unveiled. The new Orion augmented reality glasses. They are lightweight, but there's no date or price tag, no sense of when they'll launch. Why are you investing so much in this technology and how will it eventually tie into your business?
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Christopher Cox1:11
Really powerful computing in it. You can see through it so you can make eye contact. But they project a holographic display so that you can summon a screen or look at your messages, you can watch video, you can have a video chat with somebody. We've been investing for this for a long time just because we are asking the questions sort of what comes after the smartphone. And what happens in a world where you're not sort of constantly checking the phone in order to understand how to interact with other people or to check whatever it is you're looking at. So this is a major leap forward for technology, it's a big step forward for our sort of goal to help define the next generation of computing. And it was the most I'd say premium thing we showcased too.
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Julia Boorstin1:54
It was fascinating to see. What I'm curious and I see something like this? I'm trying to understand the business potential. Are you going to be selling this time? AR capability for $1,000 or will it eventually in two years be $300?
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Christopher Cox2:21
These things are doing pretty well right now in the market. You can buy them in just about any Ray-Ban store. You can talk to them, you can ask questions about what's happening in front of you. You can ask it to play music, you can make calls with it. They've been very popular.
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Julia Boorstin2:36
You can't tell us how many you've sold.
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Christopher Cox2:37
Yeah, not announcing that today. But we did announce a new model today. So we're starting to be available in more styles and rangings. These look good. They're comfortable, they're easy to use. We've worked hard to get latency down which is how long does it take for the assistant to respond, can you interrupt it? In order for these things to be natural, you want the voice...
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Morgan3:10
Chris, it's Morgan. Great to have you on the show. One of the key messages or takeaways for me today from the Connect conference was the fact that AI is driving product value. I wonder how you are thinking about that right now, if this is a situation where Meta goes it alone, or would you actually entertain the thought of integrating into another platform like, say, Apple Intelligence?
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Christopher Cox3:34
So the big announcement on the AI side for consumers today was Meta AI Voice. So you can now talk to Meta AI. It's got really good porosity, it's a natural melody in a way of interacting with it. The latency is really low. Starting today in the US, you can start talking to Meta AI and have a natural conversation in order to talk to it. Different cloud providers, et cetera. So we've been open about our approach. I think that distinguishes us from others, and as I mentioned, it means our models get better faster.
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John4:20
Chris, it's John. I'm most curious about the Meta Quest 3S which you announced today at $300. Mixed reality. Breakthrough price point. My question is about the business model because often if you've got one of these subsidized hardware situations, it's because if it's a gaming console a company expects to make money on the software. Otherwise, it's kind of hard to scale, isn't it, without losing a whole lot of money if people want to buy hundreds of thousands or millions of these?
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Christopher Cox4:54
So what we're seeing there is there's a huge now growing range toolkit for building in mixed reality gets better faster. We see that eventually applying to AR. So everything we talked about today with Orion will accrue benefit from all the stuff that's happening today in VR. In that way for the long-term business model of the company, it behooves us to have a toolkit, active developer ecosystem, lots of folks making refinements and improvements. And then development in each category, whether it's entertainment, whether it's fitness, gaming, whether it's utility, productivity we showed off today. Some of the work that you can do to make your headset...
