By Katie Paul and Anna Tong

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) -Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday rolled out new AI products for consumers, including smart glasses that can answer questions and stream directly on Facebook, as well as bots that create photo-realistic images and an updated virtual-reality headset.

Zuckerberg described the products as bringing together virtual and real worlds, and underscored that part of what Meta offered was low cost or free AI that could integrate into daily routine. Meta’s Quest is the bestseller in the nascent VR space and the company’s executives described it as the best value in the industry, a nod to the impending release of a much more expensive headset from Apple.

Speaking from a central courtyard on Meta’s sprawling Silicon Valley campus, Zuckerberg said a new generation of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses would start shipping on Oct. 17, priced at $299. The device will incorporate a new Meta AI assistant and be capable of livestreaming broadcasts of what a user is seeing directly to Facebook and Instagram, an advancement over the previous generation’s ability to snap photos. Earlier in the presentation Zuckerberg said the latest Quest mixed-reality headset would start shipping on Oct. 10.

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.

He also introduced the company’s first consumer-facing generative AI products, including the Meta AI chatbot that can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images.

“This isn’t just going to be about answering queries,” Zuckerberg said. “This is about entertainment and about helping you do things to connect with the people around you.”

Meta AI will also be built in to the smart glasses as an assistant, starting with a beta rollout in the United States. A software update planned for next year will give the assistant the ability to identify places and objects that people are seeing, as well as to perform language translation.

As he rolled out AI products, Zuckerberg showed off pictures the image generator made portraying a dinosaur as a house pet and changing the style of his dog Beast’s fur.

“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.”

Meta shares were down about 1% in midafternoon trade following the presentation.

QUEST

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.

The day’s announcements reflect 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 were watching to assess what apps they might create for Meta’s latest hardware devices. Investors, meanwhile, looked for signs of whether a gamble that has lost the company more than $40 billion since 2021 may pay off.

(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)

By Arathy Somasekhar

HOUSTON (Reuters) -Oil prices surged 3% on Wednesday to the highest settlement in 2023, after a steep drop in U.S. crude stocks compounded worries of tight global supplies.

Brent crude futures closed up $2.59, or 2.8%, at $96.55. It breached $97 a barrel during the session.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures (WTI) climbed $3.29, or 3.6%, to $93.68. The session high was over $94.

U.S. crude stocks fell by 2.2 million barrels last week to 416.3 million barrels, government data showed, far exceeding the 320,000-barrel drop analysts expected in a Reuters poll.

Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub, delivery point for U.S. crude futures, fell by 943,000 barrels in the week to just under 22 million barrels, the lowest since July 2022, data showed.

“The market is being led up by storage numbers as we are getting to the minimum operational inventories at Cushing,” said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.

Stockpiles at Cushing have been falling closer to historic low levels due to strong refining and export demand, prompting concerns about quality of the remaining oil at the hub and whether it will fall below minimum operating levels.

Prices fell last week but were rallying again as markets worried about tight supplies heading into winter, following production cuts of 1.3 million barrels a day to the end of the year by Saudi Arabia and Russia of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies known as OPEC+.

“Until a decision to raise production is made, the global energy market will remain tight,” Ole Hansen, Head of Commodity Strategy at Saxo Bank, said.

The tight supply was reflected in time spreads with front month Brent futures trading at a 42.28 premium over the second month, its highest since October, while on WTI futures, the front month traded at a $2.43 premium to the second month, the highest since July 2022.

WTI’s discount to Brent also hit its narrowest since late April.

“The market is overbought and a correction is definitely needed,” said Dennis Kissler, senior vice president of trading at BOK Financial.

Potentially adding to supply tightness, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his government to ensure retail fuel prices stabilise after a jump caused by an increase in exports.

In response, his deputy prime minister cited proposals to restrict exports of oil products purchased for domestic use.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas released a survey showing oil and gas activity in three key energy producing U.S. states has been rising with the latest jump in energy prices.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten in London, Arathy Somasekhar in Houston and Emily Chow in Singapore; Editing by Marguerita Choy, Barbara Lewis and David Gregorio)

(Reuters) -ChatGPT users will now be able to surf the web, Microsoft-backed OpenAI said on Wednesday, expanding the data the viral chatbot can access beyond its earlier September 2021 cutoff.

The artificial intelligence startup said its latest browsing feature would allow websites to control how ChatGPT can interact with them.

“Browsing is available to Plus and Enterprise users today, and we’ll expand to all users soon. To enable, choose Browse with Bing in the selector under GPT-4,” OpenAI said in a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

The startup also announced a major update earlier this week that would enable ChatGPT to have voice conversations with users and interact with them using images, moving it closer to popular AI assistants like Apple’s Siri.

OpenAI had earlier tested a feature that allowed users to access the latest information through the Bing search engine within its premium ChatGPT Plus offering. But it later disabled it because of fears that it could allow users to bypass paywalls.

ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being supplanted by Meta’s Threads app.

Its rise has driven up investor interest in OpenAI, with media including Reuters reporting on Tuesday that the startup is talking to shareholders about a possible sale of existing shares at a much higher valuation than a few months ago.

(Reporting by Samrhitha Arunasalam in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath and Pooja Desai)

By Katie Paul and Anna Tong

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) -Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday rolled out a new generation of Ray-Ban smart glasses that can stream directly on Facebook, as well as new AI products for consumers and an updated virtual-reality headset, all elements of the company’s efforts to build out an immersive metaverse. Zuckerberg said a new generation of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses would start shipping on Oct. 17, priced at $299. The device will incorporate a new Meta AI assistant and be capable of livestreaming broadcasts of what a user is seeing directly to Facebook and Instagram, an advancement over the previous generation’s ability to snap photos. Earlier in the presentation Zuckerberg said the latest Quest mixed-reality headset would start shipping on Oct. 10.

Zuckerberg also introduced the company’s first consumer-facing generative AI products, including the Meta AI chatbot that can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images.

“This isn’t just going to be about answering queries,” Zuckerberg said. “This is about entertainment and about helping you do things to connect with the people around you.”

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.

Meta AI will also be built in to the glasses as an assistant, starting with a beta rollout in the United States. A software update planned for next year will give the assistant the ability to identify places and objects that people are seeing, as well as to perform language translation.

As he rolled out AI products, Zuckerberg showed off pictures the image generator made portraying a dinosaur as a house pet and changing the style of his dog Beast’s fur.

“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.”

QUEST

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.

The day’s announcements reflect 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 were watching to assess what apps they might create for Meta’s latest hardware devices. Investors, meanwhile, looked for signs of whether a gamble that has lost the company more than $40 billion since 2021 may pay off.

Meta shares were down 3.8% on Wednesday afternoon.

(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)

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)

(Reuters) -Microsoft-backed OpenAI said on Wednesday that ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide users with current information and that browsing is no longer limited to data before September 2021.

“Browsing is available to Plus and Enterprise users today, and we’ll expand to all users soon. To enable, choose Browse with Bing in the selector under GPT-4,” the company said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

OpenAI announced a major update to ChatGPT earlier this week that will enable the viral chatbot to have voice conversations with users and interact using images, moving it closer to popular artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like Apple’s Siri.

The artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT is talking to investors about a possible sale of existing shares at a much higher valuation from a few months ago, media reports said on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Samrhitha Arunasalam in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

By Arathy Somasekhar

HOUSTON (Reuters) -Oil prices surged 3% on Wednesday, after U.S. crude stocks fell more than expected, adding to worries of tight global supplies.

Brent crude futures breached $97 a barrel, and were up $2.70 to $96.66 a barrel by 12:11 p.m. ET (1611 GMT). U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures (WTI) climbed $3.25 to $93.63. The session high for both benchmarks was a 2023 peak.

U.S. crude stocks fell by 2.2 million barrels last week to 416.3 million barrels, government data showed, far exceeding the 320,000-barrel drop analysts expected in a Reuters poll.

Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub, delivery point for U.S. crude futures, fell by 943,000 barrels in the week to just under 22 million barrels, the lowest since July 2022, data showed.

“The market is being led up by storage numbers as we are getting to the minimum operational inventories at Cushing and that’s driving markets higher,” said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.

Stockpiles at Cushing have been falling closer to historic low levels due to strong refining and export demand, prompting concerns about quality of the remaining oil at the hub and whether it will fall below minimum operating levels.

Prices fell last week but were rallying again as markets worried about tight supplies heading into winter, following production cuts of 1.3 million barrels a day to the end of the year by Saudi Arabia and Russia of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies known as OPEC+.

“Until a decision to raise production is made, the global energy market will remain tight,” Ole Hansen, Head of Commodity Strategy at Saxo Bank, said.

The lack of spare supply was reflected at the front end of the pricing curve, he said, noting the premium for near-term delivery of WTI has reached almost $2 a barrel over those for next month.

WTI’s discount to Brent also hit its narrowest since late April.

“The market is overbought and a correction is definitely needed,” said Dennis Kissler, senior vice president of trading at BOK Financial.

Potentially adding to supply tightness, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his government to ensure retail fuel prices stabilise after a jump caused by an increase in exports.

In response, his deputy prime minister cited proposals to restrict exports of oil products that have been purchased for domestic use.

Some traders worried higher interest rates could still slow economic growth and curb energy demand. Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari said it was not clear whether the central bank has finished raising U.S. rates.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten in London, Arathy Somasekhar in Houston and Emily Chow in Singapore; Editing by Marguerita Choy, Barbara Lewis and David Gregorio)

(Reuters) – The top U.S. markets regulator on Wednesday told Washington lawmakers that a looming shutdown of the federal government would reduce his agency’s staffing to “skeletal” levels, blocking it from approving companies’ Wall Street debuts and hindering its ability to respond to any market turmoil.

Democratic lawmakers, who are in the minority, repeatedly questioned U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler, seeking to highlight the dysfunction they said would result if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives does not approve spending legislation this week.

Gensler said the agency would lose more than 90% of its workforce to unpaid furloughs, leaving a “skeletal” staff to perform essential functions.

“If a company were deciding to go public or raise offerings, they’d want to go effective before Friday if they’re ready to,” Gensler said. “If not, they might be in a sort of subliminal state where they can’t access the markets because we can’t effectively review those.”

Notable IPOs in the pipeline include car-sharing platform Turo and energy storage firm Clarios International.

Gensler also acknowledged that should a major disruption occur on Wall Street, “senior leadership would be there but again we’d be down to a skeletal staff.”

According to the agency’s contingency planning, only about 440 of the SEC’s 4,600 employees would remain on hand to perform essential functions, but investigations and responses to whistleblower complaints would mostly grind to a halt.

Legally permitted functions include actions to protect life or property, such as certain steps in law enforcement and litigation, including temporary restraining orders and maintaining a portal for whistleblower complaints.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be furloughed and a wide range of services will be suspended if Congress fails to pass funding legislation that Democratic President Joe Biden can sign into law by midnight on Saturday (0400 GMT Sunday).

Major Wall Street indices were down markedly shortly toward 1700 GMT, adding to recent days’ losses driven by investor concerns about the path of interest rates, with a possible shutdown also weighing on trading.

(Reporting by Douglas Gillison in Washington and Lance Tupper and Lewis Krauskopf in New York; Editing by Paul Simao, David Holmes and Alistair Bell)

By Katie Paul and Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) -A Meta Platforms executive overseeing the company’s efforts to develop its own chips for artificial intelligence work is leaving her position at the end of the month, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Alexis Black Bjorlin, vice president of infrastructure at Meta and a veteran of chip companies Broadcom and Intel, headed a team charged with designing a custom chip to handle a range of AI work, a key part of company’s efforts to overhaul its sprawling network of data centers for an era dominated by chatbots and image generators. She is leaving her position at the end of the month but not immediately leaving the company, one of the sources said.

Yee Jiun Song, Meta’s vice president of engineering, will take over her role, and the company will continue its efforts to develop its own AI hardware, one of the sources said.

Black Bjorlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meta on Wednesday introduced the company’s first generative AI products for consumers, including a chatbot that can generate both text responses and photo-realistic images.

To create and power those features and others, Meta is reworking its data centers and building powerful supercomputers with chips from Nvidia.

Reuters reported earlier this year that Meta is also working on its own custom chips that would help it both control costs and better chart its own path independent of commercial chip providers. Some of the company’s initial efforts proved slower than using existing chips, leading the company to scrap some of its AI chips. Meta is working on a newer chip that will span all types of AI work.

(Reporting by Katie Paul and Stephen Nellis; Editing by Kenneth Li and Lisa Shumaker)

By Noel Randewich

(Reuters) – Instacart’s stock dropped 4% on Wednesday, marking a fresh low a day after it closed for the first time under the price in the grocery delivery platform’s high-profile initial public offering.

Shares of Instacart, formally called Maplebear, last traded at $28.71 compared to the $30 price set in its IPO on Sept. 18.

Retail investors bought almost $12 million worth of Instacart shares in the company’s first trading session, and net purchases have steadily declined since then, amounting on Wednesday to about $100,000, according to Vanda Research, which tracks retail trades.

SoftBank-backed chip designer Arm Holdings fell 2.5% to $52.19, just above the $51 price in its IPO two weeks ago.

After closing with a gain of 12% in its first session, Instacart has steadily lost ground.

Arm’s shares have also mostly declined after surging in their Wall Street debut, touching intra-day lows below $51 in three of the past five sessions.

Arm’s and Instacart’s recent listings have coincided with a drop in Wall Street’s main benchmarks as investors worry that the Fed could keep interest rates higher for longer than previously expected.

Their lackluster performances since their market debuts add to doubts about whether a hoped-for revival in IPOs will materialize after a drought of more than 18 months.

Meanwhile, shares of Klaviyo, which debuted a week ago, climbed 0.6% to $34.32 on Wednesday. The marketing automation firm’s stock remains above its $30 IPO price, but well below its intraday high of $37 in its first day of trading.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)