Mark Zuckerberg didn’t use Apple’s name the other day when laying out his vision for marrying superintelligent AI and his hardware. He might as well have.

The Meta Platforms chief is just the latest in Silicon Valley to put a bull’s-eye on the iPhone’s role as gatekeeper to the digital world. He did so in a manifesto that dropped during a week when everyone was fixated on earnings from Meta and its Big Tech rivals.

Zuckerberg is clearly betting that advanced artificial intelligence’s near emergence will finally open the door to a post-smartphone world. “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices,” he wrote Wednesday in an online post detailing how Meta will bring AI to users.

He’s long dreamed of unseating Apple as his users’ primary computing device—whether through his own smartphone, VR goggles or augmented-reality glasses—but failed to do so. Now, he is spending big, offering $100 million pay packages to land top AI talent in an arms race to develop and commercialize AI.

It is an area where Apple is seen as a surprising laggard. The company has delayed features, and investors worry about the lack of investment compared with the likes of Meta, OpenAI and others.

The Facebook co-founder called his vision “personal superintelligence” and drew a path for finally achieving his desire to have an Apple-like experience that combines software and hardware. What has been a cold war with the bigger rival, becomes much hotter if Zuckerberg is really able to pull off what he’s suggesting, infusing his smartglasses—which he has been touting as the perfect device for AI assistants—with much more capability than they currently offer.

“Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg isn’t alone in believing that the time is ripe for a new pecking order among tech platforms—and the new fortunes that could unlock for the winners.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting that advanced AI will open the door to a post-smartphone world.

Amazon has a deal to acquire Bee. The wearable startup offers a bracelet that records users throughout their day so AI can then create to-do lists, reminders and other functions. And OpenAI’s Sam Altman has teamed with former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to create a new physical device for AI as well, though they are coy about the form factor. They see it as a third core device after a computer and smartphone.

“If you have this incredible new technology, you can maybe get much closer to the kind of computer that exists in sci-fi,” Altman said during a podcast appearance in June.

Zuckerberg thinks the winning form factor will be glasses. Already, Meta is selling so-called smartglasses. These look like regular eyeglasses but have a tiny camera, microphone and speaker included to allow for snapping photos and videos and collecting audio recordings—all pieces of data useful in the AI world. Meta’s product road map envisions screens built into the lens to allow for a visual user interface as well.

“Once you get a display in there…that’s also going to unlock a lot of value where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day in this multimodal way,” Zuckerberg told analysts during a call Wednesday. “It can see the content around you, it can generate a UI for you, show you information and be helpful.”

For now, Meta’s glasses are used in conjunction with a smartphone. One can imagine a world where that won’t always be the case.

The power of the technology holds the promise of enabling use through voice, removing the need for a keyboard and touch screen.

On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried to assure Wall Street about Apple’s pace of investment. And he pushed back on the suggestion that AI could usher in a world where dependence on screen-based devices diminishes.

“When you think about all of the things an iPhone can do—from connecting people to bringing app and game experiences to life, to taking photos and videos, to helping users explore the world, and conduct their financial lives and pay for things so much more—it’s difficult to see a world where iPhone is not living in it,” he said.Still, Cook added, “That doesn’t mean that we are not thinking about other things as well, but I think that the devices are likely to be complementary devices, not substitution.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he sees a future that continues to rely on screen-based devices.

Facebook was born just ahead of the rise of the mobile-computing era made popular by the iPhone. In the span of a few short years, Zuckerberg was left scrambling to adapt his website to the app economy.

He would toy with a Facebook phone. But by then it was clear the world had already been split up between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. Those platforms, in turn, could command revenue shares of as much as 30% of in-app sales.

Since then, Zuckerberg has chafed at the power that Apple, in particular, holds over his company and access to his billions of active daily users. Many of them go to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp through their iPhones.

For a time, virtual reality and the so-called metaverse held the promise of ushering in a new digital realm that would give Zuckerberg an edge. So far, that technology bet has failed to capture mainstream adoption.

Apple’s own extended-reality goggles are still a work in progress. AI gives them new hope.

“If you’d asked me five years ago, whether we’d have…holograms that created immersive experiences or superintelligence first, I think most people would have thought that you’d get the holograms first,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “And it’s this interesting kind of quirk of the tech industry that I think we’re going to end up having really strong AI first.”

Zuckerberg sees his moment to take on Apple.