Welcome to Lowpass, a newsletter about the future of entertainment and the next big hardware platforms, including smart TVs, ambient computing and AR / VR. This week: An interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth about AI’s impact on AR, and Roku’s missing fall hardware update.

Meta’s Andrew Bosworth on the coming AI AR revolution

Remember that stolen underpants scene from South Park? In it, some gnomes explain why they have been stealing underwear from humans. “Phase one, collect underpants. Phase two … phase three, profit! Get it?”

Not too long ago, Meta’s Reality Labs leadership found itself in a very similar situation when they were trying to plot their company’s roadmap to AR glasses. “We literally had these architecture diagrams with just ‘AI’ written in a box,” Meta CTO Andrew Boswoth told me during a recent interview. “We didn't know … ehhh, some AI stuff will happen.”

And, as we know by now, some AI stuff did happen, with most notably LLMs emerging to turbocharge the development of smarter and better assistants. “It's so rare in this industry that a magical thing comes along that solves the exact problem that you had without you trying,” Bosworth said with a chuckle. “That's what we feel happened last year.”

Bosworth told me that AI will be key to building an interface for AR, and the company’s recent smart glasses announcements already point towards this AI-powered AR future.

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