Meta accidentally proved that AI isn’t really the innovation that we were promised
Nobody can remember the last time Mark Zuckerberg brought something new to the table. For a long time their business model was to buy competitors, now that they are at scale their business model ist to rip off competitors. That’s not meant as a criticism, from what I heard it’s way easier to make money on Instagram than it is on TikTok and Snapchat. So they do bring something to the table. But true innovation never has been Metas game. Until now.
Meta’s Orion AR glasses are the future we have been promised for years. Something even Apple couldn’t deliver – instead they invented the term »Spatial Computing« because they just couldn’t admit that the Vision Pro is nothing more than a (from all reports very good) VR headset. Something that you wear at home or in the office. A nice iteration on a product we have had for close to a decade.
Orion is different. It’s the first thing in years that could truly be the thing that comes after the smartphone. Sure, currently they are just a prototype that costs Meta around 10,000 Dollars to make. That’s still a lot of money, but cheap enough to make me believe them, that there can be a future version that actually ships.
One of the most interesting side effects of Orion though is that it confronts people with true innovation. With a vision of the future that doesn’t need to be sold to us. The last years we had to deal with the blockchain, NFTs, the Metaverse and now with Large Language and Transformer Models – a thing they tried to sell so hard that they even redefined what AI means so we would buy it.
But if you talk to your friends, even the non-nerdy ones, you don’t need to sell true AR glasses. Everybody already has a use case in mind. It is something that could enhance our every day life like the smartphone has. I even refuse to list some examples because I’m willing to bet money that every single one of you can think of at least five – especially if you ignore concerns around privacy and other things that we’ll have huge fights about in the coming decade.
Sure, »AI« plays a big role on Orion. But as a part of it, not the innovation itself. Or to quote something Steve Jobs famously said to the Dropbox founders »He said we were a feature, not a product.« The reason bring up Jobs is they way he sold us the idea of the iPhone: »an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.« It’s all that was needed to convince basically the whole of humanity to get a smartphone.
Orion isn’t a solution without a problem to solve. True AR glasses are something that people actually want. And we should remember this feeling. Because that will make us immune to people trying to hype up the newest »invention« as the next big thing that is going to disrupt our lives. True innovation doesn’t need to be sold. We already know if it’s something useful. And if we don’t … well, it might be a nice feature of the thing we actually want. But don’t believe the hype.