Meta buys Limitless, VAR for squabbling couples
Meta has decided that the future of AI is not just in your phone or your glasses but also dangling off your shirt like an extremely judgmental name tag.
The company has acquired Limitless, the startup behind a pendant device that records your real life so you can replay it later, presumably instead of forming memories the old-fashioned way.
Limitless, which used to be called Rewind before someone in branding discovered verbs, makes a wearable that clips to your clothing and quietly logs your conversations.
The device transcribes everything, then feeds the results into an app that produces searchable summaries. It is like having a personal historian following you around, except the historian is a piece of silicon that can be subpoenaed.
Meta, naturally, is thrilled. It has been talking up a vision of personal superintelligence, which is a polite way of saying it wants to make AI the operating system for your entire life.
Limitless fits neatly into that plan. “We share this vision and we will be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life,” Limitless CEO Dan Siroker said in a blog post that tried very hard to make a surveillance pendant sound wholesome.
Meta did not disclose the price, which usually means it was either very large or very awkward. What we do know is that the deal arrives the same week Meta poached Alan Dye, one of Apple’s longest serving design leaders.
Dye’s job was to make Apple products beautiful. His new job is apparently to help Meta make devices you might be willing to wear in public.
Meta already works with Ray Ban and Oakley to build smart glasses. Those glasses whisper AI into your ear. Limitless is something different. It listens back.
Limitless says it will keep supporting existing users, but it has stopped selling the device to new customers as it prepares to move into the Meta mothership.
Current users will also have to accept updated privacy terms to keep the service running. A sentence that, in most cases, should trigger the same instinct as hearing your dentist say we need to talk.
The company raised more than thirty three million dollars from investors including Sam Altman and Andreessen Horowitz. It was part of a wave of startups trying to build wearable AI companions that do not live in your pocket.
Most of them ask for audio permission. Limitless takes the more direct approach of simply recording everything until someone tells it to stop.
For Meta, this acquisition is the next step in its slow pivot away from the Metaverse toward AI hardware that feels less speculative and more consumer-friendly. Or at least consumer adjacent.
The company wants to build devices that know what you see, what you hear and eventually what you intend to do. Limitless solves one of those inputs with an elegant, slightly dystopian gadget that sits just close enough to your heart to help you forget you surrendered your privacy willingly.
So, is this the future of wearables? Perhaps. But if your wardrobe starts requiring firmware updates, do not say you were not warned.
