Meta puts AI at the service of its worlds

At Connect, an annual Meta event for developers, Chairman Mark Zuckerberg introduced “Becca, a devoted mother to her dog” and “Max, an experienced Sous Chef,” two of 28 virtual personas created to interact with users.

They’ll have their own Facebook and Instagram profiles and should have voices by next year, some of whom will be played by celebrities, like Paris Hilton (“Amber, an expert detective on who did what”) or YouTube star MrBeast (“Zack, the older brother who He mocks you kindly.”

This was the first in-person edition of Connect since 2019, before the pandemic.

Meta has been eagerly awaited in terms of generative AI, which makes it possible to produce all kinds of content (text, images, sounds, symbols, etc.) by simple querying in everyday language.

The group also provided details about the Quest 3, the new mixed reality headset that was already introduced last June. It will be marketed starting at $500 and delivered starting October 10.

Ray-Ban’s new connected glasses (which retail for $300) were also part of the show.

Generative AI now allows them to make more complex voice requests.

“Hey Mita, write me a funny Instagram caption about my cat Adobo exercising,” Lee Chin Miller, the company’s vice president, asked during a demo where she was filming her cat thanks to the camera built into the glasses.

At the end of 2021, during the pandemic, Facebook became meta with the idea of ​​becoming a metaverse company, which Mark Zuckerberg described as the future of the Internet, after the web and mobile.

But the path to augmented and virtual reality is full of pitfalls.

The California group went through a difficult year in 2022, marked by the first decline in its advertising revenues since its initial public offering in 2012. Facebook lost users, before regaining them.

The company, which has never launched a social plan in its 20 years of existence, fired 11,000 people in November (13% of the workforce) and 10,000 last March.

In this context, many investors and analysts adopt a bleak view of spending on building virtual worlds.

Reality Labs, the branch responsible for developing hardware and applications for the Metaverse, lost $13.7 billion in 2022, and Meta expects another huge addition in 2024.