There was lots of cool stuff on display Wednesday afternoon at the Meta Connect 2024 product and developer conference held at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The launch of the new Meta Quest 3S virtual reality headset — on sale Oct. 15, starting at $299 — was certainly exciting. It was also great to get updates on Meta AI and the company’s Llama 3 large language model, including the development of smaller models that can run on mobile phones and smart glasses. For me, though, it was the Orion augmented reality prototype that really stole the show. The chunky black frames, demonstrated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are still in development with no timeline on launch. However, the Orion shades represent a first look at the company’s holographic AR glasses ambitions. They represent the convergence of the company’s Quest line of headsets and its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which Jim Cramer has been praising for months and months now. During his Connect keynote Wednesday, Zuckerberg shared a montage of user experiences with the Orion glasses, showing first impressions from notable celebrities. However, the most telling was from none other than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang who said the weight of the glasses at 100 grams is a “big deal.” Huang also said, “The head tracking is good, the brightness is good, the color contrast is good, field of view is excellent.” That’s high praise from the AI chip king whose highly sought after graphics processing units are enabling and powering Meta’s artificial intelligence efforts. We have said it about these headsets in the past — be it Meta’s Quest line up or the pricey $3,499 mixed reality Apple Vision Pro — that as long-term investors we can’t think about what we are seeing in the moment. Connected headsets and glasses will get smaller at a rapid pace as capabilities increase. Think of the current offerings as the Palm Pilot from the mid-1990s, which gave way to the Blackberry in 1999 and the iPhone in 2007. After seeing the Orion prototype demo Wednesday, it’s becoming increasingly clear that today’s headsets — the more powerful clunky VR goggles and less powerful smaller smart Ray-Bans — are what the Palm Pilot was to the smartphone era. The only difference now is that the innovation appears to be happening at a much faster pace, thanks in part to the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Listening to Zuckerberg’s presentation, it’s also clear that Meta is becoming more than a social media platform company. Sure Facebook and Instagram pay the bills. But the work Zuckerberg and company are doing with large language models and on the hardware front is completely transformative and points to a very bright future. While we trimmed Meta near all-time highs Wednesday in a very oversold market, we think the company’s best days are ahead of it. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long META, NVDA, AAPL. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents Orion AR Glasses, as he makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S. September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
There was lots of cool stuff on display Wednesday afternoon at the Meta Connect 2024 product and developer conference held at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
