Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday to explain his plans to continue investing in AI, including personalization. AI ambassadors in the middle Meta’s popular smart glasses.
Zuckerberg has long championed the future vision of “personal intelligence,” the idea that AI will be used to “empower people,” as Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post in July 2025.
“My view on AI is very different from many others in the industry,” Zuckerberg said during the earnings call, and again on Facebook Wednesday afternoon. “I hear a lot of people out there talking about how AI is going to replace people. Instead, I think AI is going to enhance people’s ability to do what you want, whether that’s improving your health, your learning, your relationships, your ability to achieve your personal career goals, and so on.”
This isn’t quite the same as some tech leaders’ view of AI, but it does highlight an important difference: AI from companies like Anthropic, Google and even Microsoft for your work life. Meta — which includes social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Threads — is about your personal life.
That would be great, except that the AI industry has been changing direction this year to focus on building tools for business and enterprises, such as Claude Code again The Codex. So if Meta is going to focus primarily on the consumer side of AI (though not, as developer tools are important, Zuckerberg acknowledged), there must be other ways to use Meta AI.
This is where the products come in handy smart glasses come in to play.
“All of our glasses are designed to be easily scalable to use our AI models and features,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m also very excited to see glasses change from answering questions to being able to be a personal agent with you throughout the day, helping you remember things and reach your goals without glasses.”
Meta’s focus on building agents comes as more AI companies are working on building autonomous AI tech.
Meta Muse Sparkthe company’s latest model, the launch of the first major product from its frontier AI lab led by Alexander Wang and proves that the company is “on the path to building the best lab,” Zuckerberg said. But competitors like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic already has those labs and has been growing their modeling capabilities and customer bases.
The Muse Spark model is the first step towards the personal agent of the future, the company says. And because Meta, which has built its technology empire on e-commerce, shopping will be part of that vision.
“I don’t hear other labs out there talking about how they’re building the best AI for shopping,” Zuckerberg said. The buy-in isn’t the most important thing, he said, but it’s about a philosophical difference about the purpose of AI.
Meta is about “empowering people to do important things in their lives, whether it’s understanding the social situation or shopping or personal life matters, or understanding what’s going on around them visually…these are all aspects of the personal vision of greater wisdom.”
Meta had a turbulent first quarter of the year: It was killed and almost revived its Metaverse systemthe company renamed itself in 2021. Its smart glasses sparked a major backlash amid concerns that the Meta’s Third party contractors may view sensitive informationincluding nudity and bank records. Measure again lost two major child safety caseswhich could result in “material loss,” the company said in a phone call. Reports of impending major layoffs are not helping.
While Meta beat expectations on revenue, a slowdown in user growth sent the company’s stock price lower on Wednesday evening. Meta said Internet outages in Iran they were partly responsible for the conflict with the US and Israel, and the banning of WhatsApp in Russia.
By 2026, Meta raised its capital spending forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from the previous ceiling of $135 billion, which Zuckerberg attributed in part to “higher component costs, especially memory prices,” referring global RAM shortage caused by the high memory requirements of AI data centers.
Wall Street investors have been eyeing the Meta report, as analysts use the financial health of the so-called Magnificent Seven — the largest technology companies — as a litmus test for AI investment and the health of the global economy. Also reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon were Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft.