Alibaba, Meta and Apple Race to Put AI Agents Inside Smart Glasses

The competitive line is no longer the hardware but the assistant layer: Alibaba is bundling payments into the glasses themselves, Meta is splitting its lineup between camera-free and display models, and Apple is betting that Siri alone can carry the interaction. That divergence matters because it decides whether glasses become a payments and commerce surface or a voice-and-vision accessory. Whether iris-payment style features spread beyond Alibaba, and whether Apple's display-free bet holds up, are the open questions.