[caption id="attachment_2398" align="alignleft" width="960"] A guest attends a presentation of the updated virtual reality headset during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria[/caption] CEO of Meta Platforms (META.O) Mark Zuckerberg unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) devices for customers on Wednesday, including smart glasses that provide answers to inquiries and bots that produce photorealistic photos. Zuckerberg emphasised that part of what Meta provided was low cost or free AI that could fit into everyday routine and defined the goods as bringing together the virtual and real worlds. Because Apple (AAPL.O) will soon produce a far more costly headset, Meta's Quest is the industry leader in the emerging VR market and the company's leaders called it the greatest value in the sector. Zuckerberg said that a new version of Meta's Ray-Ban (ESLX.PA) smart spectacles will begin selling on October 17 and cost $299 while speaking from a central courtyard on the company's expansive Silicon Valley site. A step forward from the previous generation's capacity to take images, the gadget will have a new Meta AI assistant and be able to livestream broadcasts of what a user is viewing directly to Facebook and Instagram. The social network company's biggest event of the year and its first in-person conference since the beginning of the epidemic, the Meta Connect conference, featured a speech by Zuckerberg. He also unveiled the company's first consumer-facing generative AI devices and announced that the newest Quest mixed reality headset will begin delivering on October 10. Both text replies and photorealistic visuals may be produced using the latter's chatbot, Meta AI. "Sometimes we innovate by releasing something that's never been seen before," Zuckerberg said. "But sometimes we innovate by taking something that is awesome, but super expensive, and making it so it can be affordable for everyone or even free." Starting with a beta release in the United States, Meta AI will be incorporated inside the smart glasses as an assistant. The assistant will be able to recognise locations and items that users are looking at, as well as do language translation, thanks to a software upgrade scheduled for the following year. The robust Llama 2 big language model, which the business offered for general commercial usage in July, served as the foundation for the bespoke model that Meta used to create Meta AI. According to Zuckerberg, a collaboration with Microsoft's (MSFT.O) Bing search engine would provide the chatbot access to real-time data. In an interview with Reuters, Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg said the company had taken steps to filter private details from the data used to train the model and also imposed restrictions on what the tool could generate, like a ban on the creation of realistic images of public figures. "We've tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information," Clegg said, citing LinkedIn as an example of a website whose content was deliberately not used. [caption id="attachment_2399" align="alignleft" width="960"] Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech at the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria[/caption]

CUSTOM AI BOTS

Additionally, Meta said that it was developing a platform that both programmers and regular people could use to construct unique AI bots. These bots will have accounts on Facebook and Instagram and eventually show up as avatars in the metaverse. According to a blog post on the company's website, Meta produced a collection of 28 chatbots with various personalities and the voices of celebrities including Charli D'Amelio, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Brady to illustrate the tool's possibilities. Instead than creating new ad surfaces or other revenue-generating opportunities, the features seemed to be focused on improving already-existing applications and devices. "I don't see monetization of AI products happening for Meta for quite some time and I think it will end up being more indirect. They seem much more interested in helping develop a platform that other developers will use," said Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zuckerberg also said on Wednesday that Xbox cloud gaming is coming to Quest in December. Meta to begin with declared the Journey 3 headset over the summer, around the time Apple debuted its Vision Master headset, a high-end item with a cost of $3,500. Beginning at $500, the Quest 3 boasts the same mixed-reality technology that debuted in Meta's more costly Quest Pro gadget propelled last year, which appears wearers a video feed of the real world around them. The day's declarations reflect how Zuckerberg plans to explore the move this year of investor fervor to artificial intelligence from expanded and virtual reality technologies. Stakes for the occasion were tall as speculators last year pummeled the parent company of Facebook and Instagram for investing broadly on the metaverse, prompting Zuckerberg to lay off tens of thousands of staff to proceed funding his vision. Designers were observing to evaluate what apps they might make for Meta's most recent equipment gadgets. Speculators, in the interim, looked for signs of whether a bet that has misplaced the company more than $40 billion since 2021 may pay off.