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Thick frames, full hearts

Either Zuck or nothing

Do you want chunky glasses called "Orion"? That's what Meta thinks you want.

9/25/24 2:30PM

Mark Zuckerberg just wrapped up the keynote address at Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer conference.

Clad in an oversized black T-shirt emblazoned with Latin text reading “aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Either Zuck or nothing”), the Meta CEO ran through several tech demos, suffered some minor glitches, and talked about Dame Judy Dench, avocado smoothies, cattle ranching tips, and showed off some THICK prototype holographic glasses.

Zuckerberg noted that the company’s multi-year effort working on glasses, AI, and mixed reality are starting to bear fruit.

“We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look, and it's pretty awesome,” said Zuckerberg.

It’s also going to look a little weird! The big reveal at the end of the keynote was a pair of holographic augmented reality glasses called “Orion” that the company has been working on for a decade, according to Zuckerberg.

Unlike Apple’s face-hugging Vision Pro, Orion glasses look like — glasses — albeit so thick they look like they were pulled off the face of a Pixar character.

In a video of people’s reactions, the prototype glasses elicited a chorus of "that’s crazy" from various tech buddies such as digital marketer Gary Vaynerchuk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

It sounded like Orion wasn’t going to be ready to ship for a long time, probably due to the expense of the novel technology, which uses “tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses that shoot light into waveguides that have nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses,” Zuckerberg said. According to reporting from The Verge, the first generation of these expensive glasses will likely never in fact be sold to the public, who will have to wait for Orion’s second generation.

Other demos featured live language translation through Ray-Ban Meta glasses, AI-powered video translations of Instagram Reels, and virtual AI avatars that could answer questions on your behalf for... all your many fans?

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Meta reportedly strikes multibillion-dollar AI chip deal with Google as it struggles to design its own

Meta has signed a deal with Google to rent tensor processing units to develop new AI models and is in talks to buy the chips for its data centers, The Information reports.

The agreement comes on top of a recently announced “multi-generational” partnership with Nvidia and a chip supply deal with Advanced Micro Devices that could be worth more than $100 billion, as Meta scrapped its most advanced in-house AI training chip amid design challenges.

A Meta deal with Google, which has been rumored since November, would position the search giant more directly as a competitor to Nvidia in its core business of AI processors. Some analysts have said selling its custom chips to outside customers could become a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars for Google.

Google Strikes Multibillion-Dollar AI Chip Deal With Meta, Sharpening Nvidia Rivalry

Jon Keegan2/26/26

Delays in permitting, power, and zoning cause first drop in data center construction since 2020

Despite incredible demand, the number of data centers under construction in North America fell for the first time since 2020, according to new research from CBRE.

Total data center capacity under construction dropped about 5.6% year on year from 6.35 megawatts in 2024 to 5.99 megawatts by the end of 2025.

What’s causing the delay? Slow permitting, constrained supply chains, and growing public engagement with how deals are approved at the local level. Labor constraints also were cited in the report; a tight supply of skilled workers will increase costs.

US Data Center Construction Fell Amid Permit and Power Delays

-13%📱

Rani Molla2/26/26

Smartphone shipments are expected to decline 13% — the biggest drop ever — to 1.12 billion in 2026, according to new data from IDC, as the memory shortage drives up costs and prices for phones. The firm expects the average smartphone selling price to jump 14% to a record $523 this year.

The shortfall will mostly affect makers of lower-end smartphones, whose customers are more cost-conscious, while higher-end manufacturers like Samsung and Apple are likely to be more insulated from the pressure.

“The memory crisis will cause more than a temporary decline; it marks a structural reset of the entire market, fundamentally reshaping long‑term TAM (Total Addressable Market), the vendor landscape, and the product mix,” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “We expect consolidation as smaller players exit, and low-end vendors to face sharp shipment declines amid supply constraints and lower demand at higher price points.”

Jon Keegan2/26/26

Google drops new Nano Banana

Google is hoping to recapture the viral boost it received when it released its Nano Banana image generation model. Nano Banana 2 arrives today, which Google has rolled into its Gemini app.

The new model promises more accurate text rendering and translation and “advanced world knowledge,” which “pulls from Gemini’s real-world knowledge base, and is powered by real-time information and images from web search to more accurately render specific subjects,” according to the company’s press release.

New creative controls let users keep groups of characters consistent across scenes, render images with higher resolution, and parse complex prompts.

The first version of Nano Banana became popular for making action figures out of users, and helped catapult the Gemini AI app to the top of the charts, bumping ChatGPT from its perch.

Nano Banana 2: Combining Pro capabilities with lightning-fast speed

New creative controls let users keep groups of characters consistent across scenes, render images with higher resolution, and parse complex prompts.

The first version of Nano Banana became popular for making action figures out of users, and helped catapult the Gemini AI app to the top of the charts, bumping ChatGPT from its perch.

Rani Molla2/26/26

Tesla’s ride-hailing service is looking a lot more like Uber’s than Waymo’s

Despite numerous promises about amassing a giant network of driverless cars, so far it seems like Tesla’s Robotaxis are a lot more similar to Uber’s plain old ride-hailing service than Waymo’s expanding autonomous fleet.

In California, where Tesla has its largest ride-hailing service, the company has taken no formal steps to gain approval for a truly driverless car service, according to Reuters. Throughout 2025, Tesla failed to log a single mile of autonomous test driving on state roads, and has not applied for the necessary permits to test or deploy vehicles without a human present. Currently, Tesla holds only a basic permit that requires a human safety monitor to remain in the driver’s seat at all times.

Currently, Tesla’s California Robotaxi service consists of roughly 300 Teslas operated by human drivers using the company’s supervised Full Self-Driving tech. In Austin, where the company has about 45 vehicles, Tesla made a big show earlier this year of announcing it was removing the safety monitors sitting in the front seats during rides. However, to date, only a handful of those vehicles have been reported to be actually operating without a safety monitor onboard.

In other words, it’s performing a service more akin to a tech-heavy Uber ride than the one operated by Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, which earlier this week announced it now has driverless rides available to the public in 10 markets. Even Uber is trying to put space between itself and the old driver-having Ubers of yore: this week its autonomous software partner said the company plans to launch a driverless service in London this year, with plans for 10 markets.

During its earnings report last month, Tesla said it planned to offer Robotaxi service in a half dozen new cities in the first half of this year, including Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas. Judging by Tesla’s progress so far, it’s likely those services will also feature a human in the front seat.

Tesla touts California robotaxis but does nothing to get permits

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