Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune has climbed to $201 billion. As he envisions AR glasses Orion to be the future of computing, will they benefit the public?

At an event in Silicon Valley, the company exhibited a range of products meant to blend the real world and virtual reality, with a healthy dose of A.I.

At Meta’s Connect developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off Orion, a futuristic pair of smart glasses that the company hopes will lead the next foundational shift in personal computing.

Unlike the upcoming Orion glasses that have smart lenses, the current generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses have ordinary lenses. They have speakers next to each ear, a microphone and a camera that can take still or video pictures. They can see and talk, but they can’t change what you see.

Rather, Meta's core social media ad business has recovered nicely from the 2022 slump, helped along by smarter artificial intelligence algorithms. Speaking of AI, Meta's open-source Llama large language models (LLMs) have also made headlines this year.

Meta's new Orion glasses may still be a prototype that costs thousands of dollars to produce, but when you put them on they feel like the future. Driving the news: These are glasses, not goggles, that can display information and even videos overlaid on the real world — like Apple's Vision Pro in many ways,