Mark Zuckerberg Introduces New AI Products, Smart Glasses, And VR Headsets

JAKARTA - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, on Wednesday 27 September introduced the latest AI products to consumers. These products include bots that can create photos-realistic images and smart glasses that can answer questions, as well as updates to virtual reality headsets.

Zuckerberg described these products as the unification of cyberspace and real, and stressed that part of what Meta offers is cheap or even free AI that can be integrated into everyday routines. Quest of Meta is the best-selling product in a recently developed VR space, and company executives describe it as the best value in the industry, in response to the launch of a more expensive headset than Apple.

At the Meta Connect event, the social media company's biggest conference in a year and also the first face-to-face conference since the start of the pandemic, Zuckerberg announced that the latest generation of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses will start shipping on October 17, for $299.

This device will integrate a new AI assistant from Meta and can broadcast live from what users see directly to Facebook and Instagram. This is of course an advance compared to the capabilities of previous generations who can only take photos.

Zuckerberg also announced that Quest's newest mixed headset will begin shipping on October 10 and introduce the first generative AI product aimed at consumers. One of them is a chatbot called Meta AI that can generate text responses and photos-realistic images.

"Sometimes we innovate by releasing something that has never been seen before," Zuckerberg said. "But sometimes we innovate by taking something good, but it's very expensive, and making it affordable for everyone or even free."

Meta AI will be built into smart glasses as an assistant, starting with a beta launch in the United States. The software update planned for next year will provide the assistant with the ability to identify places and objects that people see, as well as perform language translations.

Meta created Meta AI using a dedicated model based on the powerful Llama 2 big language model, released by the company for public commercial use in July. "This chatbot will have access to real-time information through partnerships with Microsoft's Bing search engine," Zuckerberg said.

Meta also announced that it is building a platform that developers and the general public can use to create their own custom AI bots, which will have profiles on Instagram and Facebook and eventually appear as avatars in the metaverse.

To demonstrate the capabilities of this tool, Meta created a series of 28 chatbots with different personalities that were adapted to celebrity voices such as Charli D'Amelio, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Brady.

The announcement of the day reflects how Zuckerberg plans to navigate this year's investor interest shift from virtual reality and augmented technology to artificial intelligence. Stakes for the event is very high, as in the past year investors criticized parent company Facebook and Instagram for its huge spending on the metaverse, prompting Zuckerberg to cut ties to tens of thousands of staff to continue funding his vision.