Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Good pictures
Meta has new artificial intelligence tools and celebrity-endorsed digital assistants that CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes will eventually help jumpstart the metaverse.
Zuckerberg showcased AI software and the company’s new Quest 3 virtual reality headset and the latest Ray-Ban smart glasses on Wednesday at Meta’s Connect conference for VR developers at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Users of Facebook’s various chat apps, such as WhatsApp and Messenger, will be able to share digital stickers that can be automatically generated based on written instructions, taking advantage of the popularity of technology like ChatGPT.
For example, users can write the line “pizza playing basketball” to create a silly digital sticker of a cartoonish pizza slice holding a basketball.
Zuckerberg unveiled new AI-powered editing tools coming to Instagram next month that will let users replace their photos and images with written prompts. In a demonstration, he showed how various stimuli could transform one of his childhood photos to capture a young executive sporting an ugly sweater in one image and blue hair in another. He also transformed a photograph of his dog’s beast into an origami figurine.
Powering the new AI tools is the company’s Emu computer vision model, which Zuckerberg characterized as a kind of sibling technology to its Llama family of language-generating software. The EMU software can generate images in about five seconds, he said.
“My kids tell me it’s still not fast, but five seconds will get you to the point where you’re actually cooking,” Zuckerberg said.
Users can automatically create realistic scenes in Meta’s chat tools, similar to how people use the Midjourney AI app on messaging service Discord.
Similar to the company’s new Meta AI digital assistant ChatGPT, it generates sophisticated responses to text queries. The digital assistant can access Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which helps compile responses to prompts that require real-time information, Zuckerberg said.
Metta, Paris Hilton, Mr. It has also represented digital characters with various celebrities such as Beast and Kendall Jenner. Users can ask travel-related questions to Lorena, a digital assistant played by popular Padma Lakshmi, and Lorena can provide travel tips. Or they can play a game of Dungeons & Dragons with a narrator called the Dungeon Master, played by rapper Snoop Dogg.
Zuckerberg said users will eventually be able to create their own digital assistants, but the company wants to test that capability with select businesses before rolling it out more widely.
The big plan is to get people interacting with these AI-powered digital assistants in the company’s still-unbuilt Metaverse, a quarter-billion-dollar digital universe for Meta, which is trying to build a next-generation computing platform.
While Zuckerberg is still in the metaverse, he talks more about AI than at past Connect conferences. As illustrated by its latest Ray-Ban smart glasses developed with EssilorLuxottica, he said the company’s AI investments are linked to building the foundation for metaverse. The new glasses, which will cost $299 when they become available for purchase on October 17, are embedded with Meta’s AI software so that people can recognize or translate signs when looking at different objects.
“Before the AI breakthroughs of this past year, I thought smart glasses would only become ubiquitous with holograms and displays and all that dialing in,” Zuckerberg said.
Now, Zuckerberg said, “I think the AI part of it is going to be important as well, because AI is going to make smart glasses more compelling.
See: Meta’s identity crisis
