Interface News Reporter | Lee Kyung-ah
Interface News Editor |
If you want to play Dungeons & Dragons on one of Meta's platforms, you can play the game while chatting with the AI version of Snoop Dogg.
On September 28, Beijing time, at the annual Meta Connect developer conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the world's first mixed reality headset Quest 3.
As the most important product at the previous Conncet conference, Quest 3 has increased the price by nearly seventy percent compared with the previous generation Quest 2, and is quite similar to Apple's Vision Pro in appearance, equipped with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip. It uses binocular lenses and starts at $499, down from the Vision Pro's $3,499. Interestingly, the October 10 shipping date was also stuck before the Vision Pro went on sale.
But the launch of another core product at Connect stole a lot of the limelight from Quest 3 — Zuckerberg announced that he would integrate 28 generative AI chatbots across his Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger social platforms.
Nearly 30 different chatbots are actually 28 different role-playing roles of Meta AI, collectively known as the virtual assistant Meta AI, powered by Meta's open-source big language model Llama 2, connected to Microsoft Bing Search, capable of obtaining real-time information. In addition to chat conversations, images can be generated from text, and the overall function is almost exactly the same as ChatGPT.
In order to attract ordinary users, Meta played the celebrity effect to the extreme this time, inviting top supermodel Kendou Jenner, NBA superstar Paul, American football legend Tom Brady, and American rapper Snoop Dogg to play the roles of these 28 chatbots.
These celebrities can answer questions in their professional fields and take on new roles in the virtual world, for example, Kendou will provide professional advice on outfits and makeup; Tom Brady can give a plan for rugby training; And the previous generation of top celebrity Paris Hilton played a decryption detective; The chatbot, based on Snoop Dogg, plays the role of a dungeon master.
Users can have conversations directly with nearly 30 chatbots or create pictures through chat. Meta AI's Wen Sheng image is blessed by a new self-developed image generator called Emu. Meta has trained it on 1.1 billion pairs of photos and text, including photos and captions shared by users on Facebook or Instagram. The conference demonstrated how text generates images: enter @MetaAI /imagine+descriptive text in the dialog box.
According to Meta, Meta AI not only includes 28 chatbots with different roles, but also more general chat assistants with consistent functions, which can be added to group chats to help with routine tasks such as travel planning. Meta AI will soon find its way into WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and will be integrated into the newly launched Quest 3 and second-generation glasses, which will be used by voice.
Starting today, Meta AI will be available to a small number of U.S. users on Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. It is reported that the testing area of these chatbots is currently limited to the United States, and the scope will be gradually expanded in the future.
In a way, the launch of Meta AI means that Meta has opened up a more direct competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT on the user side. In the United States, in addition to ChatGPT, Google Bard and Quora also have high Poe usage. In addition, in recent months, the use of products for two use cases, AI companions such as CharacterAI and content generation tools such as Midjourney, has also begun to grow rapidly.
TF Securities pointed out in the research report that the overall overseas application development speed and commercialization progress at this stage may exceed expectations, as well as the development speed and commercialization progress of chatbots, AI companions and content production tools. With the continuous improvement of the iteration speed of overseas giants and models, the capabilities of general-purpose chatbots will be further strengthened, and the number of users will continue to grow.
Overall, Meta's full integration of artificial intelligence chat tools into social media at this Connect conference is a very significant turning point. There are comments that the launch of Quest 3 marks Meta's transition from VR to MR, indicating that Meta is fully capturing public and investor interest in MR and generative AI, two of the hottest emerging technologies.
This is also as Zuckerberg concluded at the end of the keynote, "MR+AI+smart glasses, this combination is the future." ”