Vitalik Buterin, the man behind ethereum, talks crypto and the U.S. crackdown
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in Prague, where he finds refuge with like-minded programmers looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.
CNBC
PRAGUE — For Vitalik Buterin, the idea of home is fleeting.
The Russia-born coder, who built ethereum in his late teens, doesn’t stay long in any one city anymore. Meanwhile, the list of places he won’t go keeps growing.
“There’s definitely a bunch of countries that I would have very gladly visited three years ago, that I’m much, much more apprehensive about visiting today,” Buterin told CNBC in an interview in the Czech Republic.
Buterin singled out his homeland of Russia as one of the destinations he now avoids. The Canadian emigre has both Ukrainian and Russian roots but has actively supported the resistance movement in Ukraine. It has also become clear that pursuing privacy technologies and open-source code carries risk in certain global jurisdictions, giving Buterin new hesitation — for instance, the creators behind the open-source protocol Tornado Cash face charges in both the Netherlands and the U.S. Tornado Cash is used by some people to protect their privacy in the still-nascent crypto market, but a mixing service can also be used by criminals or nation-states to launder money. Many in the industry worry that targeting the developers who build a tool, instead of just the bad actors using that tool, sets a dangerous precedent.
“Even in countries that the mainstream considers to still be fairly normal places — I definitely worry about those more,” Buterin says.
The decentralized lifestyle suits Buterin, a 29-year-old programmer whose influence in the crypto sector transcends lines of code — or geography. Prague is one new center of gravity where he now finds refuge with like-minded programmers collectively looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin speaks at ETHPrague 2023, an international conference drawing crypto developers from around the world.
Photo: Pavel Sinagl
We met in a sparsely furnished room at the top of a sprawling industrial complex in the Holešovice district, a neighborhood once synonymous with slaughterhouses and steam mills, that’s now home to Bohemian artists and some of crypto’s most rebellious believers. The interior of this deceptively nondescript structure is a honeycomb of labyrinthine corridors and winding staircases that snake into its fortress-like belly, echoing the complexity of crypto to the unfamiliar.
Today, the biggest challenge for Buterin and the ethereum community is making sure that it provides actual value to people.
“The way that I see the ethereum ecosystem in general is that the last decade was the decade of kind of playing around and getting ethereum right. This decade is the decade where we have to actually build things that people use,” Buterin said, hands clasped, as he leaned forward from his perch on an ergonomic-friendly kneeling chair.
He is arguably the most influential cryptographic developer alive today, but Buterin wasn’t trying to step into the limelight when he wrote the ethereum white paper in 2013. Still, years after shunning public accolades and demurring countless invitations to speak to the press, he can’t shake the fame — or the superlatives used to describe him.
Buterin was named the world’s youngest crypto billionaire at age 27 as the crypto market swelled to its peak in 2021. They call him “V God” in China, Time magazine dubbed him crypto royalty in its April 2022 cover story, and he faces mobs of fans desperate for a moment of his attention — and a selfie — virtually anywhere he goes on the planet.
But Buterin isn’t really any of those things.
He isn’t the prince of crypto. He isn’t a cult leader of new gen cypherpunks. He isn’t the wonkiest wonk, or the nerdiest nerd. He regularly gives away his fortune to worthy causes, knocking down his net worth. And he isn’t, according to his own estimation, the be-all and end-all authority on the ethereum network.
He is, however, someone who cares deeply about realizing his vision of a world where, among other things, humans have equitable access to money no matter who they are or where they live.
ETHPrague 2023 was held at Paralelní Polis in the Czech Republic.
Pavel Sinagl
Buterin finds that cryptocurrencies realize their greatest utility in emerging economies — a phenomenon that has gained momentum in recent years.
“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value to them right now, like making payments work, and savings,” Buterin said, referring to lower-income countries.
“Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don’t have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there,” Buterin told CNBC. “It’s hard to even be interested in really abstract stuff like decentralized social media, when you don’t really have those kinds of basics done.”
As U.S. investigators pressed criminal charges against the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried and federal regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission began cracking down on what they called the trade of unregistered securities, the action in crypto began to move overseas.
Whereas investors in the U.S. tend to treat crypto as more of a get-rich-quick opportunity and a way to trade on volatility in a less-regulated market than traditional securities, Buterin typically gravitates to developing markets around the world — including Africa, where he traveled in February — where he sees tangible, day-to-day use cases for the technology he helped to build.
“When I visited Argentina back at the end of 2021, lots of people use crypto, lots of people love crypto,” he said. “I literally got recognized on the streets of Buenos Aires more often than I got recognized in San Francisco.”
But for crypto to become truly useful on a global scale, Buterin told CNBC, it ultimately has to move out of centralized entities such as custodial trading platforms and it must be simpler to use.
“I found coffee shops without even looking for them that just happened to accept bitcoin and ether — but the problem is, they were all using Binance,” said Buterin.
He said he appreciates centralized exchanges such as Binance for offering a smoother user experience to non-technical people living in countries where the average GDP is less than $10,000 per capita. Nevertheless, he believes that it must become more decentralized.
“Those centralized actors are vulnerable to, you know, both pressure from the outside and to themselves being corrupted,” he said.
Last year, a wave of bankruptcies in the crypto sector exposed grift throughout the industry.
A lot of people got rich before the increase in interest rates and subsequent collapse of Luna in May 2022 set off a chain reaction that sent the entire market tumbling down, spurring a crypto winter that persists to this day. Bankman-Fried, the ex-CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, for example, faces criminal charges alleging that he promulgated a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme. Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, is being sued by both the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over a raft of accusations, including the assertion that Binance commingled billions of dollars worth of user funds with its own money.
Instead of placing blind trust in a central intermediary to act in the best interest of the customer, Buterin said, he believes the ideal solution comes down to writing better code so that users can deal directly on-chain.
“We need the experience on-chain to actually be good for regular people to use,” Buterin said.
“We need it to actually be possible to do ethereum payments in a way where the transaction fee is less than five cents a transaction; in a way where the experience doesn’t suck and randomly fail 2.3% of the time; in such a way that you need a Ph.D. in ethereum sciences to actually figure out what’s going on,” he said.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin speaks at ETHPrague 2023, an international conference drawing crypto developers from around the world.
Photo: Pavel Sinagl
Privacy and security are also key priorities.
“People need to have wallets that are actually secure, where if they lose the keys, they’re not going to lose everything,” Buterin added.
A national digital currency could provide the ease of use he envisions, but he believes that decentralization is also critical, otherwise they’ll devolve into another version of the existing banking system — only with more surveillance built in.
“That was a space where I think I had somewhat more hope, probably, naively, five years ago, because there were a lot of people who wanted to do things like make them blockchain friendly, give actual transparency and verifiability guarantees, and some kind of level of actual privacy,” Buterin said, referring to central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.
CBDCs are a type of blockchain-based virtual currency that is fully regulated and has the backing of a country’s central bank. The People’s Bank of China, which is arguably the leader in CBDCs thus far, has been piloting its take on a CBDC for almost a decade. As of June, transactions using the digital yuan, or e-yuan, hit nearly $250 billion. But as CBDCs catch on, concerns have been raised about financial surveillance and monitoring tools which can be baked into these government-issued digital currencies.
“As each and every one of those projects come to a certain maturity,” Buterin said, the privacy-preserving bits “all sort of fall away as the thing comes closer and closer to being a 1.0. We get systems that are not actually much better than existing payment systems, because they just basically end up being different front-ends for the existing banking system.”
“They end up being even less private and basically break down all of the existing barriers against both corporations and the government at the same time,” he said.
Building a new, brave world
Vitalik’s father, Dmitry, introduced him to bitcoin in 2011.
Both Vitalik and Dmitry Buterin, a computer scientist who had lived outside Moscow, were intrigued by the idea of a decentralized currency that operated outside the reach of governments or central banks. But Vitalik was keen to advance this new kind of decentralized ledger technology so that it could be put to greater use.
What ultimately put him on the map was baking smart contracts — a programmable piece of code that aims to replace middlemen such as banks and lawyers in certain types of business transactions — into the blockchain. It was a game-changing innovation for the sector that led to an explosion of projects and initial coin offerings, or ICOs, built on ethereum.
Today, the network serves as the primary building block for all sorts of crypto projects, including non-fungible tokens, or NFTs; decentralized finance, or DeFi; and web3, a still somewhat amorphous buzzword for a third generation of the internet that is decentralized and built using blockchain tech. Meanwhile, ethereum’s native token, ether, is the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap after bitcoin.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin speaks at ETHPrague 2023, an international conference drawing crypto developers from around the world.
Photo: Pavel Sinagl
In ethereum circles, hackers are known as BUIDLers — an intentional misspelling of the word “builders” in a sort of homage to the bitcoin meme HODL, or “hold on for dear life.” The meme-off may seem silly, but it gets at the core of what separates these two very different sets of people.
Bitcoiners tend to move more slowly on development, prioritizing security and decentralization above all else, while ethereum programmers tend to be more cavalier. While they aren’t necessarily breaking things as they go, they do move fast and tinker aggressively.
Last year, for example, the ethereum network fundamentally altered the way the blockchain secures its networks and verifies transactions, slashing its energy consumption by more than 99% in the process. Before this upgrade, both the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains had their own vast networks of miners all over the planet running highly specialized computers that crunched math equations in order to validate transactions. Proof-of-work uses a lot of energy, and it is one of the industry’s biggest targets for criticism.
But with the upgrade, ethereum migrated to a system known as proof-of-stake, which swaps out miners for validators. Instead of running large banks of computers, validators leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint new tokens.
Buterin insisted that ethereum’s move to a proof-of-stake model is more likely to stand up against government intervention.
“Proof-of-stake is actually easier to anonymize and harder to shut down than proof-of-work is,” he said. “Proof-of-work requires huge amounts of physical equipment and requires huge amounts of electricity. These are exactly the kinds of things that drug enforcement agencies have decades of experience detecting.”
About the ethereum network, he said, “On the other hand, you’ve got your laptop. You just need a VPN somewhere, and you hide it in a corner. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely much easier to hide.”
Coder behind the curtain
In previous appearances in Denver and Paris, Buterin’s stage presence was colored with a subtle unease. But one-on-one in Prague, he really came alive, dropping the tics and effortlessly swapping the role of elusive coder for open-minded educator.
His transparent communication style, coupled with his willingness to engage in profound philosophical discussions around concepts such as quadratic funding — a way to crowd-raise a central crypto treasury that is then used to fund public goods projects in ethereum, all with the help of an algorithm designed to optimize spending decisions — and soulbound digital identities on the blockchain have turned him into a trusted thought leader within the crypto community.
Notably, Buterin is also very willing to field any question posed to him — especially those that address critiques of the network and of the scope of his leadership position today.
Take the example of his own outsized role in the cryptocurrency he created. Unlike the pseudonymous and hidden Satoshi Nakamoto, who created bitcoin, Buterin is very much the face of ethereum.
Some see this as a significant point of weakness for the network, because governments could target either Buterin or the Ethereum Foundation. But Buterin rejects those contentions. He said that five years ago a lot more was dependent on him personally and on the foundation, but today, clients — that is, software applications built on top of the blockchain that operate independently — have taken on a lot of the work. Ethereum has become its own self-governing ecosystem, with no single point of failure, he said.
“Even if the foundation got some magic freezing order in every jurisdiction at the same time, and if something happened to me at the same time, there’s entire companies that are sole maintainers of ethereum clients that would totally be able to continue,” explained Buterin.
They call it the philosophy of subtraction.
“I think one of the ways of describing its aim is basically that the Ethereum Foundation isn’t trying to kind of be a zealot, a long-term operator or dominator, or anything like that,” he said. “The goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to foster things that, once they start, can continue in a way that’s totally independent.”
In terms of what’s next for ethereum, Buterin said a big priority is focusing on privacy and scalability through zero-knowledge rollups.
ZK-rollups are transactions bundled into sets and executed off-chain. This layer-two technology plays a major role in future upgrades that will ultimately help to make ethereum faster and cheaper to use.
“There’s definitely an extent to which there are diverging interests and there is the extent to which I think the ecosystem does need to find a way to fight hard for the right to continue to build things with the kinds of privacy that we’ve been used to for thousands of years,” Buterin said.
Clarification: Buterin does not believe he’s been targeted by any countries specifically and does not consider himself an outlaw, but is apprehensive about visiting certain countries because of his work.
Technology
Microsoft faces uphill climb to turn enterprise dominance into widespread AI chatbot adoption
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Build AI Day in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30, 2024.
Adek Berry | AFP | Getty Images
On Microsoft’s earnings call last month, CEO Satya Nadella boasted about the company’s artificial intelligence products, and said over 150 million people are using its Copilot assistant for productivity, cybersecurity, coding and other endeavors.
But conversations with IT buyers at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in San Francisco this week highlighted some of the hurdles the company must overcome as it tries to sell its AI chatbot in the enterprise market.
“I know a lot of customers who are like, ‘Yeah, I want 300 to go to zero,'” said Adam Mansfield of consulting firm UpperEdge, referring to Copilot licenses. Mansfield, who helps companies negotiate Microsoft deals, said those clients are saying, “I don’t even want it.”
Microsoft started selling the commercial version of 365 Copilot two years ago for $30 per person per month, as an add-on to its broader productivity suite. The chatbot can answer a user’s questions based on information stored in corporate systems and can run alongside Microsoft apps, summarizing email threads, creating formatted presentations and capturing key points from calls.
Microsoft is competing in AI on multiple fronts, with its heftiest investment coming out of its Azure cloud infrastructure business. Alongside a $13 billion bet on OpenAI, Microsoft is the AI startup’s key cloud provider. In October OpenAI announced a $250 billion commitment.
Microsoft said revenue growth at Azure reached 40% in the latest quarter, topping the growth rate at Amazon Web Services and Google’s cloud business.
AI agents present a different challenge. Instead of paying for the infrastructure needed to run hefty workloads, customers are buying a new tool for their employees, and the return on that investment isn’t yet clear, according to a number of clients and consultants interviewed by CNBC.
Adobe, Google, Salesforce, Workday and other vendors are also trying to sell agents to corporations, schools and governments, creating a crowded market for a still nascent technology. OpenAI and Anthropic not only have popular AI models but are increasingly catering to businesses with new services as well.
Eon, a Sequoia-backed cloud backup startup, runs its software in Azure. CEO Ofir Ehrlich said MIcrosoft has broadened Azure’s appeal for software developers and operations specialists. But the company isn’t standardizing on Microsoft’s AI software. It relies on AI coding tools from startups Cognition and Cursor and multiple AI assistants, said Ehrlich, who previously sold startup CloudEndure to Amazon.
Google’s Gemini has been making rapid advancements in the market. This week, the company debuted its latest model, Gemini 3, which it says will deliver better answers to more complex questions.
“We just had a massive 16,000-employee company move all their mail to back to Google so they can leverage more Gemini,” said Julian Hamood, founder of Microsoft partner TrustedTech.
Microsoft declined to comment.
More discounts?
Hamood said one thing Microsoft could do is provide incentives to help companies and partners pay for data-cleaning projects that would make Copilot more valuable.
Microsoft has offered some clients 50% off of the $30 list price for Copilot, he said. “But they’re starting to lean away from the Copilot discounts,” Hamood said.
Tim Crawford, a former IT executive who now advises chief information officers, said many customers aren’t getting enough from Copilot to justify the cost.
“Am I getting $30 of value per user per month out of it?” he said. “The short answer is no, and that’s what’s been holding further adoption back.”
Starting in December, a Microsoft 365 Copilot Business tier will become available at $21 per person per month for organizations with up to 300 end users, the company announced at Ignite this week.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Copilot, as Microsoft still has an advantage with its expansive user base.
Nadella said on the latest earnings call that “more than 90% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot,” though he didn’t provide an average number of users at those companies. He named five companies and a U.K. government department that each bought over 15,000 seats in the quarter, adding that most enterprise clients continued to come back for more.
Land O’Lakes butter is displayed in a supermarket in New York on Feb. 15, 2017.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
This year, butter maker Land O’Lakes rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot to all of its nearly 5,000 knowledge workers, after initially granting access to about 20% of them. A small number of employees also have Gemini subscriptions.
Land O’Lakes has long relied on Microsoft software and now runs over 70% of its infrastructure in Azure, said Teddy Bekele, the company’s technology chief, in an interview at Ignite.
Software engineers at Land O’Lakes relied on the GitHub Copilot AI automated programming software to build custom project and portfolio management software, Bekele said, adding that the company stopped paying for an off-the-shelf product.
Now Land O’Lakes is testing Oz, an assistant for retail agronomists who advise farmers. The company developed it with Microsoft Foundry software. Oz can save Land O’Lakes money as it replaces older applications, Bekele said.
‘Natural choice’
Education publisher Pearson, meanwhile, has turned on Microsoft 365 Copilot for all of its 18,000 employees. The company uses Windows, Office and Azure products, as well as Amazon and Google cloud services, technology chief Dave Treat said at the conference.
At Ignite, Pearson announced Communication Coach, an agent that will provide personalized learning recommendations through Copilot based on Teams calls, with help from OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model.
“Microsoft is dominant in the enterprise,” Treat said. “It was a natural choice if we’re thinking about how to train people in communication in the workplace.”
Microsoft is also adding more models into the fold. On Tuesday, Microsoft said Anthropic is bringing its Claude Haiku 4.5, Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4.5 to Microsoft Foundry. Anthropic committed to spend $30 billion on Azure.
“Before today, we didn’t have access to all the models from Anthropic,” Treat said. “Now we do. That’s a big improvement.”
Still, Mansfield said competition has intensified this year, and some companies have been more seriously evaluating alternatives to Microsoft’s AI products.
“Microsoft is trying to catch up, quite honestly,” Mansfield said. “That’s not what a monopoly typically has to do. They’re not comfortable. Their sales reps actually now have to learn to sell.”
According to Microsoft, the technology is getting more traction internally.
Around 70% of commercial sales, support and partner services workers now use Microsoft 365 Copilot daily, up from 20% a year ago, said Pam Maynard, the company’s chief AI transformation officer.
“We’ve got the 30% daily active usage to get after,” Maynard said in an interview. “I do believe we’ll get there, and it’s just part of change management and helping people to develop that habit.”
WATCH: Microsoft CEO of commercial business on Anthropic, Nvidia partnership
Three years since the arrival of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, more devices featuring generative AI technology have hit the market in time for the 2025 holiday shopping season, with many offering deals for Black Friday.
Shoppers can pick from more advanced smart glasses, smart speakers with genAI and a pendant AI friend that acts as a confidant.
These latest gizmos come from megacaps like Amazon, Alphabet and Meta and smaller players like Friend and Plaud.
Despite the arrival of this new wave of products, reviews for many of the devices are mixed, and nothing has separated itself as a clear leader of the pack.
That’s in part because much of the spending on artificial intelligence has been focused on other things.
Since ChatGPT was released in late 2022, the bulk of the tech industry has reoriented itself to prioritize building out large language models in a race to reach artificial general intelligence, or AI with the capabilities that are on par with, or surpass, humans.
Thus far, much of the development in Silicon Valley has focused on AI apps, including chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, image generators like Google’s Nano Banana or feeds for AI-generated short-form videos like OpenAI’s Sora. All things people can access on their existing smartphones without a spiffy new gadget.
But the world of AI hardware is growing fast.
If you’re in the market for the latest AI devices, here’s what’s available to snag this holiday season.
Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, announces the Echo Studio and Echo Dot Max during an Amazon event showcasing new products in New York City, U.S., September 30, 2025.
Kylie Cooper | Reuters
Alexa+ Echo speakers
Amazon wants to make sure its Alexa voice assistant and Echo smart speakers don’t get left behind in the era of genAI.
The company unveiled Alexa+ in February, promising a smarter, more conversational and personalized version of its 11-year-old digital assistant. In September, it followed up with a new set of Echo speakers and displays, which are the first devices to come with Alexa+ out of the box.
The lineup includes a $100 Echo Dot Max, $180 Echo Show, $220 Echo Studio and $220 Echo Show 11.
The Echo Dot Max is an entry-level, all-purpose smart speaker, while the Echo Studio is larger, pricier and offers better sound quality. The main difference between Amazon’s smart displays, the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11, is the touchscreen size.
All of the devices have improved sensors, speakers and microphones.
Amazon is offering 11% off the cost of the Echo Show 11 and 10% off the Echo Dot Max as part of its Black Friday promotions.
With the upgrades, Amazon is aiming to have users engage more often with the devices than their predecessors. Consumers frequently complained that Alexa had grown outdated while the Echo devices offered little utility beyond setting timers, spouting weather forecasts, playing music and controlling smart home accessories, like turning lights on and off.
Amazon’s recent Alexa ad tries to paint a different picture.
Comedian Pete Davidson strolls through his kitchen when an Alexa-equipped Echo Show announces, unprompted, that the “Coffee’s on, and your Uber is on its way.” Davidson then casually banters back and forth with Alexa about his preferred nickname.
The interaction is meant to showcase a few of Alexa+’s biggest selling points — users don’t have to repeat a so-called “wake word” after every command, allowing the conversation to flow more naturally.
The devices can also now connect to external services to take actions on users’ behalf. As of now, Alexa+ can book an Uber or OpenTable reservation, generate a song via Suno, plan a trip through Fodor’s, schedule a repairman visit and purchase concert tickets through Ticketmaster. Amazon has said it expects to add more capabilities soon.
Alexa+ isn’t yet available to the general public. Consumers have to wait to receive Early Access or purchase a new Echo model to use it.
Amazon is offering Alexa+ for free to users with Early Access, but at some point, the company will begin charging non-Prime members $19.99 a month for the service.
The company is also making moves in wearables.
Amazon in July announced plans to acquire AI company Bee for an undisclosed amount, indicating that it could have more hardware infused with the technology in the works. Bee is known for its $50 wristband that uses AI and microphones to listen to and analyze conversations, then provide to-do lists, summaries and reminders for everyday tasks.
— Annie Palmer
A person holds Google Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro Fold mobile phones during the ‘Made by Google’ event, organised to introduce the latest additions to Google’s Pixel portfolio of devices, in Brooklyn, New York, U.S., August 20, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Google’s AI-powered Pixel 10 series
Although the Gemini-powered Google Home Speaker won’t roll out until the spring, Alphabet did deliver some generative AI tech this year.
Launched in August, the Pixel 10 smartphones thoroughly integrate Google’s AI into several features, such as live translation, text-based photo editing and the built-in Gemini assistant.
The baseline Pixel 10 starts at $799, while the Pro lineup includes the $999 Pixel 10 Pro, the $1,199 Pixel Pro XL and the $1,799 Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The Pro line offers a higher quality camera and display, as well as additional video features.
Among the AI products is “Magic Cue,” which connects data across different apps to surface relevant information and suggest helpful actions. For example, if a user receives a message asking about a dinner reservation’s location, Magic Cue can find the answer from the calendar app.
For snapping pictures, Google provides an AI “Camera Coach,” which scans the scene of a photo and offers recommendations about framing, lighting and other techniques to improve the image.
The Pixel 10 Pro phones come with a one-year subscription to Google’s “AI Pro” plan, which typically costs $19 per month and offers multiple AI tools, including writing assistant NotebookLM and video generator Veo 3.
All the Pixel 10 models are currently on sale for $200 to $300 off until Dec. 6, except for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which has a $300 markdown until Dec. 2, the company said.
— Jaures Yip
The Meta Ray-Ban Display AI glasses at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s AI-infused Ray-Ban smart glasses
Meta’s partnership with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, originally inked in 2019, has spawned a surprise hit in the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that both companies are keen to boast about.
With the Meta AI digital assistant, users can command the camera-equipped glasses to take photos, play tunes and to answer questions about nearby landmarks.
In September, the two companies debuted the latest version of the glasses, dubbed Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2).
The new model has double the battery life of its predecessor and an improved camera. It costs $379, which is $80 than the prior version.
Meta and Luxottica this year also launched two smart glasses aimed at athletes under the Oakley brand.
The $399 Oakley Meta HSTN glasses are pitched toward casual athletes who want to take photos while playing sports like golf, while the $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses are geared toward the action-sports crowd, like skiers.
The Vanguard glasses feature a flashier wraparound design and two buttons on the frames’ underside that lets helmet-wearing athletes easily take photos and videos and perform other actions.
For those willing to spend big money and test new technology, Meta and Luxottica also rolled out the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses in September.
They are the first glasses Meta sells to the public that include a display, albeit a small one, in just one of the lenses. The display is intended to show users small bits of information, like navigation directions. The glasses also include a wristband that utilizes neural technology so users can command the device with gestures like rotating one’s fingers to adjust volume.
Buying the $799 glasses, though, is not easy.
Meta requires that people sign-up for in-person demos at stores like Best Buy and LensCrafters before buying the product, and the company warns that “availability varies by store, so you may not be able to purchase a pair immediately after your demo.”
Early reviews for the display glasses have been mixed.
Some reviewers have praised the device’s color display, camera and innovative wristband. Still, others have criticized its high price and have said its lack of apps limit functionality.
Meta is currently offering a few Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for some of its various AI-powered smart glasses that will last until Dec. 1.
People can save 20% on all versions of the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1) at Best Buy, Target, Amazon and also at Meta’s website and the Ray-Ban website and stores. Meta is also offering 20% off the cost of prescription lenses for people who buy the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) and Oakley Meta HSTN glasses from its website.
— Jonathan Vanian
Friend AI Pendant
Source: Friend
The AI friend you wear around as a pendant
Most AI chatbots want to make the user more productive. The makers of this smart pendant want AI to be your friend.
Users wear Friend, as the product is aptly called, around their necks while the $129 device listens to the conversations happening around it.
Friend’s chatbot is powered by Google Gemini, and it offers commentary on the user’s conversation and life. Those comments appear as notifications through the device’s corresponding smartphone app.
For example, when one reviewer played a new Taylor Swift song for her AI friend, the device commented through a notification that it didn’t “think it’s bad at all” and “pretty typical for pop.”
The device is at the center of the societal debate about the rise of AI.
Friend plastered a subway station in New York this fall with ads that suggested that the pendant was better than a real friend, promising that it “will never bail on our dinner plans.”
The posters were immediately defaced with messages like “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.”
Those wanting to experience what it’s like to wear around an AI friend should place orders swiftly.
The company’s website currently says units will be shipping “Winter 2025/26,” but Friend founder Avi Schiffmann told CNBC that devices ordered early enough will ship before Christmas.
— Kif Leswing
Plaud Note
Source: Plaud
Plaud, the AI recorder
The Plaud Note looks more like a credit card than a voice recorder, but it’s an ideal purchase for any note taker who wants to capture meetings, lectures or any dictation.
With over 30 hours of recording time and battery that last 60 days on standby, the slim device can produce transcriptions in 112 languages. The transcriptions include tags for each speaker on the audio.
The recorder’s companion app is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. The app uses those AI models to generate detailed summaries and notes. Users can select from over 3,000 summary templates, such as phone Q&As or seminar notes.
The Plaud App’s basic plan offers 300 minutes of transcription per month, though users can upgrade to a pro plan for 1,200 minutes for $8.33 per month or a more expensive unlimited plan for $19.99 per month.
The recorder can easily be attached to phones with MagSafe magnets, meaning all Apple smartphones since the iPhone 12 series, or phone cases with similar magnets.
The company also offers the Plaud NotePin, a smaller, pill-shaped version of the recorder that can be worn as a magnetic pin, clip, wristband or necklace.
Typically priced at $159, both devices are currently on sale for 20% off during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with another 15% markdown set for Christmas, the company said.
— Jaures Yip
WATCH: Google releases Gemini 3.0 model, closes gap on ChatGPT
Technology
New IRS reporting requirements will make a classic crypto ‘tax cheat’ risky starting with 2025 return
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