Mark Zuckerberg unveiled new AI products such as bots that create photo-realistic images, smart glasses that answer questions and an updated virtual-reality headset.
Meta’s Quest
He described these as bringing together virtual and real worlds, and underscored that part of what Meta offered was low cost or free AI that could become a part of daily routine.
The company’s Quest is the bestseller in the still developing VR space, and executives described it as the best value in the industry, acknowledging the impending release of a much costlier headset from Apple.
Ray-Bansmart
Zuckerberg said a new generation of Meta’s Ray-Bansmart glasses would start shipping on Oct. 17, priced at $299.
It will include a Meta AI assistant and be capable of live streaming broadcasts of what a user is seeing directly to Facebook.
There’s also Instagram with an advancement over the previous generation’s ability to snap photos.
The latest Quest mixed-reality headset would start shipping on Oct. 10.
Meta AI
He also introduced the company’s first consumer-facing generative AI products.
It includes a chatbot called Meta AI that can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images.
Meta AI will be built into the smart glasses as an assistant, starting with a beta rollout in the United States.
Software update planned for next year will give it the ability to identify places and objects that people are seeing along with language translation.
Meta AI is developed using a custom model based on the powerful Llama 2 large language model that the company released for public commercial use in July.
It will have access to real-time information via a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg said the company had taken steps to filter private details from the data used to train the model and also imposed restrictions on what the tool could generate, like a ban on the creation of realistic images of public figures.
Quest 3
Meta first announced the Quest 3 headset over the summer, around the time Apple debuted its Vision Pro headset, a high-end product with a price of $3,500.
Starting at $500, the Quest 3 boasts the same mixed-reality technology that premiered in Meta’s more expensive Quest Pro device launched last year, which shows wearers a video feed of the real world around them.
