Meta Offers AI to Billions
Meta rolls out Emu image gen, AI Studio, Custom AI Chatbots, and AI-Enabled RayBans
Let’s cut to the chase: Meta at their Connect 2023 event this week has gone all in on AI. Many tech companies are doing the same and going all in on AI, but Meta has brought to the table some distinct features. Here’s the main items, which we will dive into deeper below:
Emu image generation
Meta AI and Custom AI Chatbots
AI Studio
Smart Glasses and Quest3 mixed-reality headset
The importance of these AI announcements is that Meta is opening the door to vast consumer adoption of AI. There are billions of people on the Meta social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, messenger, and their Metaverse. This has big implications: There will be rapid consumer adoption of generative AI.
Emu Image Generation
They offered an image generation tool called Emu, which stands for Expressive media universe. By itself, Emu is not a fundamentally different feature than Midjourney image generation, but the speed is impressive. They touted it taking only 5 seconds to generate high-quality images.
What’s far more important though is how accessible this tool is. They embedded Emu as a suite of features across their social media platforms - Instagram, Facebook, etc. - to create and enhance images with AI.
For example, you can create AI stickers using Emu, generating custom stickers from a text prompt:
They announced AI-enabled image-editing features are coming to Instagram in the US, namely:
Restyle: Using a word or phrase, you can create a custom filter. They showed a number of ways to reconfigure a long-haired dog, in yarn, origami, and other over-lays of styling of an image.
Backdrop: Cut out any object, in any scene, and replace the backdrop with a text-driven image. This uses the Segment Anything Now capability that Meta AI Research developed and released earlier this year.
Meta AI and the AI Chatbots
They are offering Meta AI as your basic AI assistant, a ChatGPT-like chatbot, to answer basic questions and requests. The Meta AI chatbot is built on the Llama2 LLM, and will be accessible on the messenger (chat) platforms.
You can generate AI images within the chatbot, similar to how you can now get Bing chat or ChatGPT to draw a picture.
They developed and trained AI chatbots for specific purposes and topics and that have more ‘personality’ and opinions. These are some of their tuned AI chatbots:
Max, sous chef, who can help with recipes and cooking.
Lily, personal editor AI to help you better write and edit.
Lorena, your travel assistant AI to help plan vacations or find places to eat or stay.
Snoop Dogg is your AI Dungeon Master, your chatbot guide to adventure gaming.
Bob the Robot is there for academic help.
Tom Brady for sports talk.
Chris Paul is the golf guru.
Paris Hilton is a detective.
Mr Beast is Zach the comedian.
They are rolling these out in beta starting now, and adding voice for these AI chatbots next year.
AI Studio
The most interesting AI-related announcement is Meta’s platform for customized AI creation. Meta calls it AI Studio. “We are building a platform for creating AI that can help you get things done, or just have fun.”
To enable custom AI, they will open up APIs to enable training, and even mentioned no-code solutions for those without programming skills, so people can still create custom AIs.
These AIs will have profiles on social media, where you can interact with them. “We will be bring this to the Metaverse as well. These AIs will be embodied as avatars. You will be able to make them NPCs in various games and worlds.”
So, for example, you can train an AI on yourself and your AI body-double can interact with others in the Metaverse as an avatar.
This feature is not unique, as other companies have developed ability to create custom AIs. Whether this will go beyond a basic one, or the creation - like OpenAI allows - to has customized system instructions. AI customization only gets meaningful when you fine-tune or add specific custom data.
Custom AIs might also become a path to influencer monetization, as people use these AIs as a channel to put out their content; think “AI bot” as a channel. How that might work remains to be seen, but here’s a hint: On Dexa.ai, they fed the entire Andrew Huberman podcast corpus to create an AI Andrew Huberman who could answer any question on health and longevity.
So if Meta’s custom AI creations could be like that, they’d have a winner. If the platform is open enough, creative people will build that future.
Smart RayBan Glasses and Quest3 mixed-reality headset
Meta is offering the next generation of Meta RayBan smart sunglasses. Lens aren’t special or AR/VR, but they have a built-in 12 megapixel camera, and an immersive speaker and immersive mic array in them. You have do calling, send images, and live-stream all hand’s free with these glasses.
So what is the AI angle? “These are the first smart glasses that are built and shipping with Meta AI in them.” You can interact with state-of-the-art AI and ask questions and get answers hand’s free.
Next year, the glasses will be multi-modal, and so the glasses will be able to answer questions about the visuals the glasses is seeing. Zuck showed examples including translating a foreign menu.
This could be a fundamental breakthrough in that AI-enabled audio interfaces are getting good enough they can displace the smartphone interface for many use cases, perhaps driving more user adoption as they get more useful.
The Trajectory of AI
Before this week, Meta was playing a very interesting role in AI by being the most willing promoter of open source AI. The week, they went all in on AI chatbots, custom chatbots, and AI infused features for image generation and editing, and more.
The big story here is that Meta is assuring use that AI will not just be a productivity tool, but that AI will also be infusing our consumer experiences, and as such will be used by billions of consumers.
They are betting on the Metaverse, and they see a future where AIs interact with us on social media platforms and in the Metaversee. In this future, we don’t need one super-smart know-it-all AI model to answer all questions. We will interact with various kinds of customized and specialized AIs, both for advice and for entertainment.
Now, we can see why it’s a reasonable business strategy for Meta to promote open source AI models. Meta is not making money controlling the AI itself. Meta’s future involves end-users and intermediaries building fine-tuned and custom AIs and planting those AIs on Meta’s platforms and in their Metaverse. A diversity of free and open AI models is a win for Meta.
Postscript. Lex, Zuck and the Metaverse
Lex Fridman interviewed Mark Zuckerberg this week, and he did it in a special place: The Metaverse. Though physically in different states, they donned headsets and had an avatar one-on-one interview, where Lex marvelled at the hyper-realism of the experience.
Since AI intersects with the Metaverse, and custom AIs are coming there some day, I look forward to my own interaction with the AI Lex and AI Zuck in the Metaverse.