Chinese AI smart glasses take on Meta at CES 2026

The SCMP piece underscores how aggressively Chinese firms are betting that AI wearables—not smartphones—will be the next big personal-computing surface. By pairing local and US large language models with translation, AR overlays and gesture control in glasses that look more like fashion accessories than dev kits, players like Rokid, Xreal and Alibaba are trying to leapfrog Meta’s early lead. This is a classic Chinese hardware playbook: iterate fast, compete on price and form factor, and rely on a dense supplier ecosystem to scale.

For the race to AGI, the shift matters because AGI won’t just live in the cloud; it will need convincing embodiments in daily life. Smart glasses that can quietly stream multimodal context into models—what you’re seeing, hearing, and doing—are an ideal front end for more agentic systems. If Chinese vendors succeed in normalizing such devices globally, they’ll control a critical distribution channel for future AGI assistants, especially in markets where Western wearables are less dominant. That in turn could give Chinese ecosystems disproportionate influence over which capabilities become standard and how tightly they’re integrated into the physical world.