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Welcome back to our weekly roundup of happenings from XR and AI realms. Let’s dive in…
The Lede
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have both surpassed one billion monthly users. ChatGPT reached the milestone several weeks before Gemini, after reporting 900 million weekly users in February, but its growth has slowed. Gemini, meanwhile, climbed from 750 million monthly users in February to over 1 billion in August, making it Google’s fastest-growing product ever. Google says the figure covers the standalone Gemini app, with more than 100 million users on iOS and most of the remainder on Android.
Feeling Spatial
Apple Brings Live MLB Games to Vision Pro. Apple and Major League Baseball will stream four live Friday Night Baseball games in Apple Immersive Video on Vision Pro, beginning August 28 with the Boston Red Sox at the New York Yankees. The 180-degree, stereoscopic 3D broadcasts will offer multiple viewing positions, along with replays, lineups and statistics displayed in the viewer’s space. Additional games are scheduled September 4, 11 and 18, concluding with the San Francisco Giants at the Los Angeles Dodgers. The games require an Apple TV subscription and will be available in the U.S. and eight other markets. Full-game replays and highlights will also be available.
Beat Saber Gets Its First Price Cut in Seven Years. Road to VR’s Scott Hayden says it may soon be free to play. Meta has permanently reduced Beat Saber from $30 to $20 on Quest, SteamVR and PlayStation VR2, its first price reduction since the game’s 2019 launch. The VR hit had generated more than $200 million in sales by early 2025, while expanding from 10 included tracks at launch to more than 60, plus over 250 paid DLC tracks. Road to VR’s Scott Hayden speculates Meta may be testing the waters for an eventual free-to-play Beat Saber. Free-to-play games increasingly dominate Quest’s top-selling chart, where Beat Saber currently ranks ninth. Hayden suggests the $20 price could let Meta test whether lowering the barrier to entry increases DLC spending before risking a full free-to-play conversion.
Will XR devices reach $50 billion by 2030? Artillery Intelligence predicts steep growth, driven by the momentous AI glasses category. The traditional leaders in VR and mixed reality are flat or declining, but that could be offset by the continued momentum in smart glasses with toned-down visuals or no visuals at all. That makes them mainstream-friendly, which has been the biggest lesson learned in the XR industry over the past half-decade. Accelerating that trend, we could see an inflection next year, the report states, when several devices from Apple, Samsung, and others are due to hit the market all at once. And Snap Specs remain the wild card with a full-fat AR approach. That covers the supply, but for all the above, demand remains a question mark. Will users show up?
The AI Desk
OpenAI-Backed Thrive Holdings Raises $2 Billion. Thrive Holdings raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation from investors including SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital. The Thrive Capital spinout acquires traditional businesses and introduces AI into their operations, initially focusing on accounting and IT services. OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings in December 2025 and sends employees to work directly with its portfolio companies on AI adoption. Thrive has acquired accounting firms Crete Professionals Alliance and Geller, and IT services companies Shield Technology Partners and ClearScale. The new funding will also support expansion into businesses involving physical assets.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a full-throated defense of AI: a 6,500-word manifesto arguing that the most common concerns are overblown and fail to account for all the positives it can achieve. “The Future Is for Everyone” lays out Meta’s vision for “personal superintelligence:” powerful AI distributed broadly to individuals rather than controlled by governments, corporations, or a handful of AI labs. In his vision of AI, the biggest risk is that one government or entity has too much power over the technology. Zuckerberg argues AI should primarily expand human creativity and agency, not simply automate jobs. He envisions persistent personal agents helping with work, education, health, finances and relationships, with AI glasses becoming an important interface.
Accompanying the release of the manifesto, Meta released Muse Glimmer, a new open-weight AI model designed to run agentic tasks locally on Macs and PCs using a single graphics card. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said larger models are coming soon while calling for fewer U.S. restrictions on open-weight AI to help American developers compete with Chinese companies. Meta also plans to release Muse Spark 1.2, which Zuckerberg described as the company’s most advanced model, and announced a $1 billion fund for communities affected by data-center construction. The announcements accompanied Zuckerberg’s 14-page essay, “The Future is for Everyone,” advocating broader access to AI models and infrastructure.
It’s hard to believe Zuckerberg’s last manifesto, “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together,” will turn five this fall. It may be useful to analyze Meta’s AI ambitions in this light. Everyone says this time it’s going to be different, and it never is. Whelp. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Cinematic Corner
Warner Bros. Taps AI Dog Podcasters ‘Goldie and Frenchie’ for Movie Promotion. The AI-generated hosts of DogPack’s popular DogPack Pawdcast, were hired to promote Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s The End of Oak Street. Created using Google Veo 3, the talking dogs built an audience of more than one million followers across Instagram and TikTok before signing with WME. In the promotional episode, Goldie and Frenchie interview Starbuck, the dog appearing in the film. DogPack says humans, not AI, write the characters’ scripts.
Curious Refuge’s Pick Winston by Chris Wan has more story than most features. Winston is a short, eight-minute, AI-generated film about a boy and his robotic dog that strongly recalls Steven Spielberg’s AI, except it’s better and shorter, and really is AI. Filmmaker Chris Wan says he developed the story from a simple premise into a story about grief, love and letting go. The filmmaker spent nearly two months completing it, with production repeatedly interrupted by exhausted generation credits, blocked prompts and AI struggles with children, animals, physics and continuity. Different scenes required different generation workflows, followed by extensive traditional post-production in DaVinci Resolve and Fusion, including compositing, sound design and color grading. Wan says the experience reinforced that AI filmmaking still depends on traditional fundamentals: storytelling, editing, problem-solving, performance and continuity.
This column has a companion, The AIXR Podcast, hosted by its author, Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap and Synthbee AI.Our guest this week is Mark Greget, founder and CEO, Nueyes. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Spatial Audio
This column has a companion, the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by its author, Charlie Fink; Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox; and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap and Synthbee AI.
Last week’s guest was Courtney Harding, founder of Friends with Holograms. (see video below). Our guest this week is Mark Greget, founder and CEO, Nueyes. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Episodes drop on Fridays, and you can find them on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Charlie Fink
AR Insider Contributor