Chinese AR start-up Rokid puts Alibaba AI in smart glasses to take on Meta

Rokid’s US$345 smart glasses are the latest from China to adopt generative AI to capitalise on the burgeoning product category

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The Rokid Glasses include a number of use cases that are aided by artificial intelligence, including real-time translation and messaging. Photo: Rokid

Ann Caoin Shanghai

Published: 9:00pm, 19 Nov 2024

Chinese augmented reality (AR) start-up Rokid has a new pair of lightweight smart glasses that it says will allow it to go head-to-head with Meta Platforms, as it eyes profitability in 2025.

The Hangzhou-based company, founded by former Alibaba Group Holding employee Misa Zhu Mingming, on Monday announced the Rokid Glasses, its first AR glasses equipped with large language models (LLMs) – the technology that underpins intelligent chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The glasses use Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs, marking the start-up’s best effort yet to crack the consumer market, Zhu told the South China Morning Post. Alibaba owns the Post.

With the new product, Rokid is entering the smart glasses market amid an explosion of fresh interest stemming from new capabilities introduced by generative AI. Facebook owner Meta has been one of the biggest beneficiaries with a smart glasses line it created with Ray-Ban.

In September, Meta also teased “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made”, called Orion, but it said they are currently too expensive to mass produce for consumers. Those glasses are completely self-contained computers. Many lower-cost AR glasses, including earlier pairs made by Rokid, mirror the image from another device like a smartphone, connected via USB-C.

Misa Zhu Mingming, founder and CEO of Rokid, speaks at the launch event for its new AR glasses on Monday. Photo: Rokid

In China, a number of companies have jumped on the bandwagon, most recently internet search giant Baidu, which launched its Xiaodu AI Glasses last week.