In a recent interview, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman bluntly stated his discomfort with Meta smart glasses.
While talking on tech journalist Alex Heath’s “Sources Podcast,” Altman said: “I find it very uncomfortable talking to people with a camera and a light.”
This isn’t the first time he has shared his aversion. In 2025 at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, when asked if his sunglasses were smart glasses, he responded: “Absolutely not. I don’t like smart glasses.”
Altman’s statements come out in direct contradiction to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push into the smart glasses market. The company, whose partner is Ray-Ban, managed to sell over 7 million pairs of smart glasses powered by AI last year within its parent company, EssilorLuxottica.
They are becoming a major revenue source. The Reality Labs division of Meta that includes consumer hardware reported revenues of $431 million in the second quarter of 2026, up $61 million from a year ago. The sale of smart glasses balanced the slow-down in Quest headset sales.
But the increasing popularity led to privacy issues as well. Several locations announced the ban of smart glasses while Instagram failed to implement its promise to address the problem with people secretly recording harassing videos.
Despite all of Altman’s complaints about glasses, he admitted that OpenAI was working on AI-powered devices together with Jony Ive – the famous designer of the iPhone.
Altman added: “I think there’s something that belongs on a table, there’s something that belongs in your pocket, and there’s something that belongs to your body.”
When asked about OpenAI’s wearable hardware, he said it will “take us some time to launch all of those things.”
2026-09-02 18:28:00
