Meta VP of Wearables Alex Himel shares the internal origin story of how Mark Zuckerberg messaged him on a Saturday to turn Ray-Ban smart glasses into an AI hardware product.
“That was a Saturday, by Monday, we had pivoted 200 people on the team to be building AI for these glasses, and the rest is history.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Himel
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Himel: AI wearables will fail without existing analog adoption habits
“If you don't see a lot of people doing that already with analog versions, I think it's unlikely that you're gonna see an AI version take off.”
Alex HimelJun 11, 2026▶ 9:43Meta' Secret Plan To Kill The Smartphone — With Alex Himel
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Himel: Wearables will eventually become the best form factor for AI
“And we believe that wearables will be the best form factor eventually for the AI. Because they're always with you, they can see what you see, they can hear what you hear, and there's something you can talk to throughout the day when you need it, and they can b…”
Alex HimelJun 11, 2026▶ 19:04Meta' Secret Plan To Kill The Smartphone — With Alex Himel
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Himel: Wearables will become ubiquitous without completely replacing smartphones
“At some point, we think that they'll be ubiquitously used by people providing a ton of value. That doesn't mean phones are gonna go away, but I think you'll see wearables be used for some of the things that you do on phones today. And a bunch of things that yo…”
Alex HimelJun 11, 2026▶ 43:35Meta' Secret Plan To Kill The Smartphone — With Alex Himel
AssertionSupported
Himel: Meta has not launched facial recognition on smart glasses
“We don't have a feature called that or that does that feature that's launched in the glasses.”
Alex HimelJun 11, 2026▶ 46:00Meta' Secret Plan To Kill The Smartphone — With Alex Himel
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Himel: Context-aware wearables will intelligently filter notifications based on conversation state
“The potential of the wearables is that if they have context of are you, whether or not I'm talking at the moment, or what am I saying, or who am I talking to, they should be able to really intelligently filter out whether it's the right moment to deliver somet…”
Alex HimelJun 11, 2026▶ 31:07Meta' Secret Plan To Kill The Smartphone — With Alex Himel
Insight
Himel: Wearable AI companies fail by jumping too far into future
“I think when a lot of companies and people have tried to get into this space and say, hey, what's going to be possible with this? I think they try to jump too far into the future and ignore kind of how to get there.”
Alex HimelJun 11, 2026▶ 1:57Meta' Secret Plan To Kill The Smartphone — With Alex Himel
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.