Apple, Meta and OpenAI pour billions into Spatial AI as tech giants shift beyond chatbots

Forget chatbots: Why Apple, Meta and OpenAI are racing toward 'Spatial AI'

The next chapter is AI that actually understands the physical world around you When AI was first introduced, it came in the form of assistants like Siri and Alexa, then came chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. Since then, we've seen agentic AI (AI agents) take over our computers and do the work for us. Now, big tech is racing towards a new type of AI that truly seems like something out of a sci-fi movie. At least until now. It's called spatial AI and the biggest names in tech are already throwing billions of dollars at it. Rather than simply generating text or images on a screen, spatial AI gives artificial intelligence something it has largely lacked until now: spatial awareness. Here's what you need to know about the next major shift -- and why the battle lines are being drawn right now. What is spatial AI anyway? You've probably heard the term a few times and maybe not given it a second thought. However, it's worth understanding, especially because AI moves at such break-neck speeds. Most of us will be using spatial AI more frequently in the upcoming months. You can think of spatial AI as the ultimate upgrade for machine vision. Instead of looking at an isolated photo, for instance, like a chatbot analyzing an uploaded image, spatial AI builds a continuous, three-dimensional understanding of its surroundings. Essentially, it's the difference between looking at a single snapshot of your living room versus actually walking through it, navigating around the coffee table and knowing exactly where the doorway is. While a Large Language Model like ChatGPT knows facts because it was trained on text, a spatial AI system uses cameras, sensors and learned models of physics to track location, movement and objects. Using that information, the AI continually updates its understanding of the world. The race to spatial AI Alongside Apple, Meta and OpenAI, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA and others are all building toward AI that understands physical reality. In fact, World Labs has raised $1 billion to advance what Li calls "spatial intelligence". Here's how the biggest players in tech line up at the moment: * Apple: The company's genuine advantage is in spatial sensing, thanks to the depth and motion hardware developed for Apple Vision Pro. The company is pushing "Visual Intelligence" and, at WWDC 2026, debuted Spatial Reframing -- a photo tool that builds on Apple's spatial models from Vision Pro to let you reposition a photo's perspective after it's taken. (It ships with iOS 27 this fall and is currently in beta.) * Meta: It's no secret that Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to own the post-smartphone era, and in glasses, Meta is the one with the lead. Meta Ray-Bans launched in October 2023 and effectively created the wearable-AI category. Now, Meta is investing in spatial AI so future hardware can actively see what you see -- rumored "super sensing" tech in the next generation would enable real-time recognition of objects, locations and even people (a capability that's also raising real privacy questions). * OpenAI: As one contender in a crowded field, not the clear "brain" for everyone else's hardware, it's building its own robots, too. The company's objectives toward multimodal models, world simulation, robotics and autonomous agents point in the same direction as its competitors. * Google DeepMind: The company is developing spatial AI through projects like Gemini Robotics, which combines vision, language and physical reasoning to help robots understand and interact with the real world. It is also building world models such as Genie that can generate and simulate interactive 3D environments, allowing AI to learn how physical spaces and objects behave. Meanwhile, Project Astra gives AI continuous visual awareness, enabling it to recognize objects, understand spatial relationships and maintain context as a user moves through their environment. Where you'll see it first You won't download a standalone "Spatial AI" app. Instead, it'll quietly supercharge tech you already use. * Smartphones: Your phone's camera has already become a real-time tool. If you've ever pointed it at a branch and wondered if it was poison ivy or something safer, you already have started using the capability. * Smart glasses: Unlike smartphones, smart glasses like those from Meta, Google and RayNeo X3 Pro AR, let you interact with AI while keeping your hands free and your eyes on the world. They can identify objects, translate signs, answer questions about what you're looking at, and provide contextual information in real time, making spatial AI feel like a natural extension of your vision. * Robotics: Spatial and physical intelligence such as understanding 3D geometry, gravity, materials and persistence, is seen as critical for robotics and autonomous vehicles, giving machines the situational awareness to operate outside controlled settings. * Self-driving cars: Autonomous vehicles already rely on real-time 3D modeling of roads, pedestrians, and cyclists to predict what happens next. The outlook The biggest shift coming with spatial AI isn't that your gadgets get smarter; it's that they become aware of context. Right now, your tech answers questions after you ask them. The ambition is still early, and spread across far more than three companies, but the goal is hardware that understands where you are and what you're doing before you type a single prompt. We're in the early beginning, which is why I wanted to help you to grasp what is happening now. The world-models paradigm only moved into mainstream AI development in late 2025 and early 2026, and the hard problems of cost, accuracy and privacy are far from solved. But just as generative AI changed how computers understand language, spatial AI is aiming at how computers understand reality itself. What are your thoughts on spatial AI? Let me know in the comments and share your thoughts on this new era of technology. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. Finally, you can visit our dedicated Tom's Guide Savings Squad hub for expert help on getting the best products for less.

AI Has Outgrown The Chat: Investor Anna Namit Sees Growing Potential In Spatial Computing

Following Google Cloud Next 2026 and the WAIB Summit in Monaco, investor, art expert, and technology commentator Anna Namit believes the artificial intelligence industry may be approaching a major inflection point. While much of the technology sector remains focused on increasingly powerful AI models, Namit argues that the next phase of growth will not be defined by intelligence itself, but by the environments in which that intelligence operates. "The market has spent years asking how smart AI can become," Namit says. "The more important question now is where AI will live." That shift could create a new scarcity: digital space. From Chatbots To Intelligent Environments The first wave of artificial intelligence was built around language models and conversational interfaces. The next wave, Namit believes, will focus on spatial computing, virtual reality, augmented reality, and immersive digital environments. The market appears to agree: the global spatial computing platform market is projected to grow from $164 billion in 2025 to more than $1.2 trillion by 2035, at a CAGR of 22.05%. "AI is moving beyond conversation and into interaction," she explains. "Just as human intelligence developed through engagement with physical environments, artificial intelligence will increasingly require environments where it can operate, collaborate, and create value." Why Some Investors Are Beginning to Watch This Space Closely While generative AI continues to dominate headlines, Namit sees potential long-term opportunity in technologies enabling immersive digital experiences. She points to advances in virtual and augmented reality hardware, rapid improvements in spatial scanning and digital twin technologies, increasingly realistic graphics and simulation environments, and the accelerating development of autonomous AI agents. According to Namit, the convergence of these technologies is becoming increasingly apparent as advances in AI, computing power, and immersive technologies continue to develop. "Billions of AI agents may soon exist," she says. "The question is where those agents will work, interact, and create economic value." Rather than competing solely on model performance, future technology leaders may compete by building the environments where intelligent agents operate. In Namit's view, the companies that define the next decade may not necessarily create the smartest models, but instead create the ecosystems where those models can thrive. This framework aligns with forecasts from major research firms. By the end of 2026, Gartner estimates that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents, up from less than 5% in 2025. By 2027, spending on agentic AI is projected to surpass spending on chatbots and assistants. The Rise Of The Experience Economy She predicts that AI-generated images will evolve into AI-generated worlds, transforming passive experiences into immersive and interactive environments. Films could become participatory experiences, exhibitions could become living digital spaces, and luxury brands could increasingly focus on creating digital universes rather than simply selling products. As a longtime art investor, collector, and curator, Namit sees parallels between technological evolution and previous cultural transformations. She argues that value is increasingly shifting away from ownership of physical objects and toward ownership of experiences. The AI Renaissance Meets The Meta-Renaissance Namit describes the current moment as part of a broader AI Renaissance, a period characterized by the rapid expansion of machine intelligence across nearly every industry. However, she believes the next stage of this transformation, which she calls the Meta-Renaissance, will focus on creating immersive worlds where that intelligence can operate autonomously. In this framework, the winners of the next decade may not be determined solely by advances in artificial intelligence. Instead, they may be determined by who creates the most compelling digital environments and experiences. "The next race will not simply be a race for models," Namit says. "It will be a race for worlds." Looking Toward 2035 Namit believes the years between 2026 and 2035 could mark the emergence of what she calls the Spatial AI Economy, an era in which millions, and potentially billions, of intelligent agents interact across virtual and augmented environments. The result could be entirely new business models, entertainment platforms, digital marketplaces, creative industries, and forms of economic activity that have yet to be imagined. "People often compare today's AI boom to the early internet," Namit says. "But future generations may look back on today's chatbot era the way we look at text-based computing, an important beginning, but only the first chapter." For investors, entrepreneurs, technology leaders, and creators alike, the implications may extend far beyond artificial intelligence itself. The next frontier, Namit suggests, may not be simply smarter machines, but also the creation of the environments in which they operate. Those environments may include virtual worlds, but they may also encompass robotics, augmented reality, intelligent infrastructure, and entirely new forms of interaction between humans and machines. Ultimately, one of the defining opportunities of the next decade may lie not in choosing between the physical and digital worlds, but in building the ecosystems that connect them. The future of AI may not belong exclusively to virtual worlds. It may belong to extended realities, where intelligent agents operate seamlessly across digital environments, augmented spaces, robotics, and the physical world itself. The ultimate scarcity may not be intelligence, but context, interaction, and ecosystems. Image Credit: Unsplash This post was authored by an external contributor and does not represent Benzinga's opinions and has not been edited for content. The information contained above is provided for informational and educational purposes only, and nothing contained herein should be construed as investment advice. Benzinga does not make any recommendation to not sell any security or any representation about the financial condition of any company. The information provided in this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as financial advice. 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