Meta Goes All-In on Generative AI with Celebrity-Based "Characters," Meta AI Chatbot, and More
New LLM technology coming to WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, as well as the company's new Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.
Facebook owner Meta has announced its next-generation virtual and mixed reality (VR and MR) platform, new wearable smart glasses, and "Meta AI" — a "conversational assistant" powered by a large language model (LLM) which will include access to 28 "personalities," including celebrity digital twins.
Where Meta Connect — formerly Facebook Connect — events in recent years have been pushing the "metaverse" concept heavily, this year's is different: a big focus for the company was not on virtual environments where, founder Mark Zuckerberg hopes, people will play, learn, and work, but on the integration of artificial intelligence technologies into Meta properties.
The core of this new push: "Meta AI," launching in the US in beta as a competitor to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT platform. Using this, the company promises, you can converse with a machine on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram and receive text or photo-realistic images "in seconds." The platform's generative AI system will also power an "AI sticker" offering, augmenting the existing sticker portfolio with text-to-image generation using the Llama 2 and Emu models.
Emu will also soon be added to Meta's image-editing systems, allowing for style transfer — think "turning your photos into a Van Gogh painting" — and background replacement using text-based prompts. These, though, play second fiddle to Meta AI itself — a Llama 2-based chat bot with internet access through a partnership with Microsoft's Bing search platform. This is to be integrated into all of Meta's chat products, it says, as well as its smart glasses and virtual reality platforms in the near future.
Like ChatGPT, the primary Meta AI is designed to be friendly but relatively personality-free — which is where the company's "characters" come in. Selectable from a list of 28 at launch, these drop-in personalities range from "the big brother who will roast you" to an "Anime-obsessed Sailor Senshi in training" — and are "played" by celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, and Charli D'amelio. Each "character" is given Facebook and Instagram profiles, the company says, to deepen the immersion.
In Meta's final AI announcement, the company took a step back from consumer-facing offerings to unveil "AI Studio" — a platform for "coders and non-coders alike" to create their own conversational AIs using Facebook's models. This platform will initially target businesses and creators, the company says, and will include a "sandbox" for experimentation — a sandbox which will, in a demonstration that Meta has yet to give up on the concept, be coming to the nascent metaverse.
On that very topic, Meta also had some hardware announcements to make at the event — starting with the Meta Quest 3, a mixed-reality headset launching alter this year starting at $499.99. This, the company claims, offers a 30 percent increase in visual resolution and 40 percent louder audio than the Quest 2, while offering "breakthrough mixed reality" using the company's Passthrough technology.
For more subtle wearables, Meta also unveiled new smart glasses made in partership with Ray-Ban, boosting both the audio subsystem and the integrated camera.
The Meta Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are available to pre-order in the US now, while the Meta AI functionality launches in beta today with a gradual roll-out to Meta's various messaging platforms.
