CEO of Meta Platforms (META.O), Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) devices for customers on Wednesday, including smart glasses that answer 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 the everyday routine and defined the goods as bringing together the virtual and real worlds. Because Apple (AAPL.O) will soon produce a far more costly headset, 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 (ESLX.PA) smart spectacles will begin selling on October 17 and cost $299 while speaking from a central courtyard on the company’s expansive Silicon Valley site.
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 directly to Facebook and Instagram.
The social network company’s biggest event of the year and its first in-person conference since the beginning of the epidemic, the Meta Connect conference, featured 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.
Zuckerberg states, “Sometimes we innovate by releasing something that has never been seen before.” But occasionally, we innovate by taking something fantastic but extremely expensive and making it accessible to everyone or even free.
Starting with a beta release in the United States, Meta AI will be incorporated inside the smart glasses as an assistant. The assistant will be able to recognize locations and items that people are looking at and 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, collaborating with Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) 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 stated, “We’ve tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information,” using LinkedIn to illustrate a website whose content was purposefully omitted from the analysis.
SPECIFIC AI BOTS
Additionally, Meta said it was developing a platform that programmers and regular people could use to construct unique AI bots. These bots will have Facebook and Instagram accounts and eventually appear 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 of creating new ad surfaces or other revenue-generating opportunities, the features seemed to focus on improving existing applications and devices.
“I don’t anticipate Meta’s monetization of AI goods happening 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 Quest will 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 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 shift this year’s investor frenzy 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 to continue funding his vision, raising the stakes for the event.
Developers were observing to determine 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 be profitable.
