Meta Connect 2023: Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook-streaming eyewear and an AI helper

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) products for customers, including smart glasses that provide answers to inquiries and bots that produce photorealistic photos.

Zuckerberg emphasized that part of what Meta provided was low cost or free AI that could fit into everyday routine and defined the goods as bringing together the virtual and real worlds. In reference to the upcoming introduction of an Apple headset that would be much more costly, Meta’s Quest is the industry leader in the emerging VR market and the company’s leaders called it the greatest value in the sector.

Zuckerberg said that a new version of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses will begin arriving on October 17 and cost $299 while speaking from a central courtyard on the company’s expansive Silicon Valley headquarters. A step forward from the previous generation’s capacity to take images, the gadget will have a new Meta AI assistant and be able to livestream broadcasts of what a user is viewing straight to Facebook and Instagram.

The social network company’s largest event of the year and its first in-person conference since the beginning of the epidemic, the Meta Connect conference, included a speech by Zuckerberg.

He also unveiled the company’s first consumer-facing generative AI devices and announced that the newest Quest mixed reality headset will begin delivering on October 10. Both text replies and photorealistic visuals may be produced using the latter’s chatbot, Meta AI.

According to Zuckerberg, “sometimes we innovate by releasing something that has never been seen before.” But sometimes we innovate by taking something fantastic but very costly and making it accessible to everyone or even free.

Starting with a test release in the United States, Meta AI will be included inside the smart glasses as an assistant. The assistant will be able to recognize locations and items that people are looking at, as well as do language translation, thanks to a software upgrade scheduled for the following year.

The robust Llama 2 big language model, which the business offered for general commercial usage in July, served as the foundation for the bespoke model that Meta used to create Meta AI. According to Zuckerberg, a collaboration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine would provide the chatbot access to real-time data.

President of Meta Global Affairs Nick Clegg claimed in a Reuters interview that the business had taken precautions to remove private information from the data used to train the model and had also placed limitations on what the tool might produce, such as a prohibition on the generation of realistic photographs of prominent personalities.

Clegg said, “We’ve tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information,” using LinkedIn as an example of a website whose material was purposefully left out of the analysis.

unique AI bots

Additionally, Meta said that it was developing a platform that both programmers and regular people could use to construct unique AI bots. These bots would have accounts on Facebook and Instagram and ultimately show up as avatars in the metaverse.

According to a blog post on the company’s website, Meta produced a collection of 28 chatbots with various personalities and the voices of celebrities including Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Brady to illustrate the tool’s possibilities.

Instead than creating new ad surfaces or other revenue-generating opportunities, the features seemed to be focused on improving already-existing applications and devices.

“I don’t anticipate Meta’s monetization of AI goods occurring for a while, and I believe it will ultimately be more indirect. The principal analyst of TECHnalysis Research, Bob O’Donnell, observed that they “seem much more interested in aiding in the development of a platform that other developers will use.”

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that Quest would start offering Xbox cloud gaming in December.

Around the time Apple unveiled its $3,500 Vision Pro headset in the summer, Meta made its initial announcement of the Quest 3 headset.

The Quest 3’s starting price of $500 includes the same mixed-reality technology that was first introduced in Meta’s more costly Quest Pro gadget introduced last year, which provides users with a video stream of the outside world.

The day’s announcements show how Zuckerberg intends to handle this year’s investor frenzy shift from augmented and virtual reality technology to artificial intelligence.

The parent firm of Facebook and Instagram came under fire from investors last year for spending heavily on the metaverse. This forced Mark Zuckerberg to fire tens of thousands of employees in order to continue financing his vision, raising the stakes for the event.

Developers were observing to see what applications they may make for Meta’s newest hardware. Investors, however, searched for indications that a risky bet, which has cost the business more than $40 billion since 2021, may turn out to be profitable.