By Katie Paul and Anna Tong
MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) -Meta Platforms introduced the company’s first generative AI products for consumers, including a chatbot that can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images, at an event on Wednesday where CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an update on his plan to build an immersive metaverse.
Earlier in the presentation Zuckerberg said the latest Quest mixed-reality headset would start shipping on Oct. 10.
Zuckerberg introduced the company’s first consumer-facing generative AI products, including a chatbot that can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images.
“A big part of this innovation is about making sure that these technologies are accessible to everyone,” Zuckerberg said, adding that making innovative new products that are affordable for everyone is “really important.”
Meta made the assistant, named Meta AI, using a custom model based on the powerful Llama 2 large language model that the company released for public commercial use in July. The chatbot will have access to real-time information via a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Zuckerberg said.
The company is also building a platform that developers and ordinary people alike may use to create custom AI bots of their own, which will have profiles on Instagram and Facebook and eventually appear as avatars in the metaverse, he said.
To demonstrate the tool’s capabilities, Meta created a set of 28 chatbots with different personalities, styled in the voices of celebrities like Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady, according to a company blog post.
Women’s soccer star Sam Kerr, for example, served as the inspiration for Sally, a bot described by Meta as a “free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath.”
Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that Xbox cloud gaming is coming to Quest in December.
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.
Zuckerberg spoke at the Meta Connect conference, the social media company’s biggest event of the year as well as its first in-person conference since the start of the pandemic.
The day’s announcements are expected to indicate how Zuckerberg plans to navigate the shift this year of investor fervor to artificial intelligence from augmented and virtual reality technologies.
Stakes for the event are high as investors last year slammed the parent company of Facebook and Instagram for spending extensively on the metaverse, prompting Zuckerberg to lay off tens of thousands of staff to continue funding his vision.
Developers will be watching to assess what apps they might create for Meta’s latest hardware devices. Investors, meanwhile, will be scouting for signs of whether a gamble that has lost the company more than $40 billion since 2021 may pay off.
Just before the event, Meta said it was delivering on a plan announced early last year to roll out mobile and Web versions of its flagship social VR platform Horizon Worlds. It also quietly added legs to its previously upper-body-only virtual reality avatars, as spotted by industry blog Upload VR.
(Reporting by Katie Paul and Anna Tong in Menlo Park, CaliforniaAdditional reporting by Yuvraj Malik, Pushkala Aripaka and Shashwat Awashti in BengaluruEditing by Kenneth Li, Peter Henderson and Matthew Lewis)
