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Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc., speaks onstage during the Snap Partner Summit 2023 at Barker Hangar on April 19, 2023 in Santa Monica, California. 

Joe Scarnici | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Snap on Tuesday announced the fifth generation of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses that can overlay digital graphics onto the physical world.

The latest Spectacles are only available for developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for one full year if they want to build AR apps for the device. The glasses can produce more compelling digital visuals than the prior version and are built on top of a redesigned software operating system dubbed Snap OS.

Additionally, Snap is partnering with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to give developers tools that will allow them to build and port their artificial intelligence features for the smart glasses.

Snap’s announcement comes days before rival Meta’s Connect event, a conference where Facebook’s parent typically unveils its latest hardware. Like Meta, Snap has been trying for years to break into consumer hardware. Unlike Meta, Snap’s core online advertising business has been struggling.

Snap shares fell more than 20% after the company reported its latest quarterly results in August. Investors balked at weaker-than-expected guidance for the third quarter, and the company’s revenue for the second quarter trailed analysts’ expectations.

The previous day Meta reported better-than-expected quarterly results that sent the stock price up 7%. Still, Meta’s AR and VR bets continue to rack up losses — the company’s Reality Labs unit posted a $4.5 billion loss in the second quarter. That unit is responsible for the company’s Quest virtual reality devices and Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Since 2020, Meta has poured more than $63 billion in expenses into its hardware efforts. The company has yet to find meaningful success, but Wall Street has afforded Meta patience with Reality Labs because the company’s advertising business is thriving.

Meta brought in $131.9 billion in advertising sales for 2023, and reported net income of $39.1 billion for the year. By contrast, Snap recorded $4.6 billion in total revenue and a net loss of $1.3 billion in 2023.

“We are at a point where the challenge with Snap is that it is just functioning at a different scale than Meta,” said Leo Gebbie, a principal analyst and director at CCS Insight.

Fifth-generation Spectacles are pictured in a handout image, obtained by Reuters on September 12, 2024. 

Snap | Via Reuters

With Meta selling its Quest VR headsets at a loss in order to lead and influence the overall VR market, Gebbie said he expects the company to follow a similar aggressive pricing strategy if it debuts its own AR device. For Snap to compete, the company’s AR device must be “something really impressive” that incorporates the best of its core Snapchat app and appeals to the younger demographic that differentiates it from Meta, he said.

Snap doesn’t break out financials for its hardware efforts as Meta does, but the company has struggled to find success selling hardware.

Snap debuted its first internet-connected Spectacles glasses in 2016, pitching the $130 devices as an easy way for users to capture short, first-person videos that they could post on Snapchat. A year later, Snap disclosed that it wrote down nearly $40 million due to losses from unsold Spectacles, underscoring the challenges it faces selling consumer hardware products.

Since then, the company has released other versions of its Spectacles smart glasses, including a version for $380 in 2019. In 2021, it sold a pair of glasses with AR capabilities in limited numbers to developers and creators instead of the general public, making the product more of a prototype requiring further improvement before a wider release.

Beyond glasses, Snap said in 2022 that it would stop developing its Pixy flying camera drone just months after it released the $230 gadget.

In getting out ahead of Meta with its latest AR glasses, Snap is using a strategy taken by the Facebook parent last summer when CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed details of the company’s Quest 3 VR headset a week before Apple announced its much-anticipated Vision Pro VR headset.

Much of Meta’s AR strategy involves sprinkling some AR features into its Quest-branded VR headsets while simultaneously pushing its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, made in partnership with EssilorLuxottica. The two companies on Tuesday announced that they had extended their partnership to continue developing smart glasses.

Although Meta doesn’t release sales figures, Zuckerberg has told analysts that its Ray-Ban Meta glasses that went on sale in October “continue to do well and are sold out in many styles and colors, so we’re working to make more and release additional styles as quickly as we can.”

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has centered the company’s hardware efforts around camera technology, which he believes is a natural fit with the core Snapchat app and its 850 million monthly active users.

It’s unclear how much longer investors will stomach Snap’s hardware push.

“We have seen the losses on Reality Labs grow quarter by quarter, and investors have indulged this because Meta is making enough profit from its advertising business,” Gebbie said. “Snap is hugely more constrained. It’s in a position where to meaningfully compete on hardware is going to be incredibly challenging.”

WATCH: Jim Cramer discusses Snap and the market

Cramer’s Mad Dash: Snap

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Meta’s AI spending comes into focus amid Trump’s tariff policies

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Meta’s AI spending comes into focus amid Trump’s tariff policies

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks on before the luncheon on the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second Presidential term in Washington, U.S., Jan. 20, 2025. 

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Mark Zuckerberg’s plan is to make Meta the market leader in artificial intelligence. Investors will want to know how President Donald Trump’s tariffs-heavy trade policies will impact that strategy. 

Those answers could start to come as soon as this week as Meta’s AI strategy takes center stage when the company hosts its first Llama-branded conference for AI developers on Tuesday then reports its latest quarterly earnings the next day.

Already, tech companies are starting to talk about the potential impact they’re bracing for as a result of the Trump tariffs. 

Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said Thursday during the chip giant’s first-quarter earnings call that U.S. trade policies “have increased the chance of an economic slowdown, with the probability of a recession growing.” Meanwhile, Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said that day during a first-quarter earnings call that the tech giant remains committed to its $75 billion investment in capital expenditures, or capex, this year, but also acknowledged that the “timing of deliveries and construction schedules” could cause some quarter-to-quarter spending fluctuation. 

For now, analysts expect Meta to follow Alphabet’s lead and remain firm in its plan to spend as much as $65 billion in capex for AI infrastructure this year when it reports earnings Wednesday. Some analysts believe Meta could even raise the figure because AI is a core priority for the company.

“We do not expect META to cut its CapX guidance of $60B-$65B in 2025, for its GenAI infrastructure,  because they see this as an important 10-year investment, we believe,” Needham analysts wrote in a research note published Wednesday. “However, tariffs add risks of upward cost revisions.”

Investors will also be monitoring Meta’s LlamaCon event at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters for any signs that its AI investments are having an immediate business impact. This will be the first time Meta hosts a developer conference specifically for its Llama family of AI models.

“Investors want to see ROI on all these AI investments, and while Meta has shown clear benefits from leveraging AI to improve its products and drive faster revenue growth, it’s been hard to quantify those benefits,” Truist Securities analyst Youssef Squali told CNBC.

Meta in April released a couple of its new Llama 4 models, which Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox previously said can help power so-called AI agents that can perform tasks for users via web browsers and other online interfaces.

It’s critical that Meta keep improving Llama to create a major business involving AI agents that companies can use to interact with their customers within apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, William Blair research analyst Ralph Schackart said.

Meta has an early mover advantage at scale in a multi-trillion dollar market,” Schackart said in an email. “We believe Meta is very well positioned to leverage its billions of global users across multiple platforms.”

Meta is unlikely to curb its Llama investment any time soon, but should eventually consider doing so if it fails to generates enough money to justify its costs, said Ken Gawrelski, a Wells Fargo managing director of equity research.

“We do believe that over time Meta needs to continue to evaluate whether Llama needs to be competitive with the leading-edge models,” Gawrelski said. “This is a very expensive proposition and thus far, unlike Google, Meta does not directly monetize its model in any material way.”

Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer at Meta Platforms, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 17, 2023. 

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Meta AI and the consumer

Analysts are also following the Meta AI digital assistant. That’s because the ChatGPT rival represents the second pillar of Zuckerberg‘s AI strategy. 

Zuckerberg in January said he believes 2025 “is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.”

In February, CNBC reported that Meta was planning to debut a standalone Meta AI app during the second quarter and test a paid subscription service, in which users could pay monthly fees to access more powerful versions like users can with ChatGPT. 

Although Meta’s enormous user base across its family of apps gives Meta AI an advantage over rivals like ChatGPT in terms of reach, they may not interact with Meta AI in the same way they do with rival chat apps, said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Deepak Mathivanan.

Gawrelski said that people may not want to use Meta AI within Facebook and Instagram if all they want to do is passively watch the short videos that Meta algorithmically recommends to their feeds.

“This is why a separate Meta AI, where Meta could clearly articulate its use case and value proposition, could be helpful,” Gawrelski said.

A standalone Meta AI app could help the company better market the digital assistant and distinguish it from rivals, said Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst for Sonata Insights.

“ChatGPT has such wide brand awareness, that it’s become a moat that is soon going to be very hard to overcome,” Williamson said.

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How TikTok’s rise sparked a short-form video race

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How TikTok’s rise sparked a short-form video race

TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.

Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.

TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.

“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”

Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.

“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.

But there may a dark side to this growth.

As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.

“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”

Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.

“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”

Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.

While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.

Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.

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Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings in talks to raise $20 billion, Bloomberg News reports

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Elon Musk's xAI Holdings in talks to raise  billion, Bloomberg News reports

The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.

Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.

The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.

Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.

Faber Report: Elon Musk held call with current xAI investors, sources say

The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”

Read the full Bloomberg story here.

— CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

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