Meta’s ambitions to lead the virtual and augmented reality future have not faded away, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology as a compelling way to make that happen. He has made it clear across several interviews this past week that he believed recent advances in generative AI were essential for maximising the variety of applications in the “metaverse.
According to the Meta CEO in his recent interview, he emphasized the importance of generative AI in unlocking the full potential of the “metaverse”. Digital avatars that will be included in Meta’s products will be one of their main focuses. It will be a future improvement to Facebook, Instagram, Threads and other existing products.
“I think that’s going to be very compelling and interesting, and obviously, we’re kind of starting slowly on that,” he said in an interview with The Verge on Wednesday.
He is looking to digital assistants and AI to help push the metaverse forward. Meta is also building a digital voice assistant to help people interact hands-free with physical devices in the metaverse. This virtual assistant will help users in the metaverse. It could be AI-powered assistants, such as an AI chatbot platform, or people with special skills (e.g., language translation).
The progression of the company’s goal can be seen recently. Just last week on 27 September, Meta launched the new generation of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which, in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, features a digital assistant called Meta AI. Users can just directly communicate with the AI companion using voice, text or physical gestures.
He also mentioned in the interview with The Verge about text-based adventure games and playing text-based games that could be included in Thread, the text extension app of Instagram.
Zuckerberg envisions AI becoming more adaptive and widespread, aiding businesses, creators, and consumers. Examples include AI chatbots assisting with cooking, workouts, and vacation planning. These AI profiles may have a presence on social platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
There have been critics of Meta AI’s ambitions. Even if he is aware and acknowledges that not everything Meta does is open source, much of its work and the company are “probably a little more open-source” than his competitors. Making all of the code open source is a risk that could be abused and he did acknowledge it.
When it comes to AI security, the CEO noted that being as transparent as possible means drawing more attention, which may result in the development of new industry standards that would be a “big advantage” on the security front.
