Recently, Rokid CEO Zhu Mingming was interviewed by the South China Morning Post, where he stated that DeepSeek's AI model is providing new momentum for China's smart glasses industry to compete with Meta.

Zhu Mingming remarked, “DeepSeek’s low-cost, high-performance model is fundamentally reshaping the economics of AI deployment. For example, the inference model DeepSeek-R1 is significantly cheaper than [OpenAI]’s GPT-4o model, which will help companies in this sector drastically reduce R&D and operational costs.”

In November last year, Rokid launched its first AR glasses equipped with a large language model (LLM), enabling support for generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While the AI-powered Rokid glasses appear similar to regular eyewear, users can utilize them for photography, real-time translation, navigation, and messaging.

Zhu Mingming believes DeepSeek is transforming the industry. He noted that, combined with China’s advantages in hardware supply chains and optics, DeepSeek’s AI model will offer more flexible solutions for the smart glasses sector, helping to accelerate product adoption.

Recently, consumer electronics supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in an article that “since DeepSeek’s viral spread, the trend of on-device AI has been accelerating.” Meanwhile, a report from Guotai Junan Securities also predicts that DeepSeek-R1’s high-performance inference in smaller models will accelerate the rollout of AI-powered devices, boosting shipments of AI-supported smartphones, personal computers, and smart glasses.