More from All the news from Meta Connect 2023

You can talk to it directly, or bring it into any chat you’re having on Instagram or Messenger or WhatsApp. This seems to be Meta’s all-purpose AI assistant, its answer to Bard and Bing and ChatGPT. But nobody can touch Meta’s ability to get this thing in front of a lot of people really fast.

I’m excited to see what kind of abominations I can create with the stickers. We’ve got the story explaining those stickers, and the other tools, right here.

It stands for “Expressive Media Universe,” and it’s Meta’s answer to DALL-E and MidJourney. Zuckerberg says they work in about five seconds, and the images he’s showing us look pretty good! In the whole “AI generated images are always kind of creepy” way, anyway.

Zuck just talked about productivity apps on the Quest 3, including Microsoft Office. I swear to god, if you stick me in a virtual Excel hellscape, I will yeet myself from existence.

We’ve known since last year that Cloud Gaming was coming to Meta’s VR platform, but now we know when. Zuckerberg (who accidentally almost called the platform “XCloud” on stage) mentioned the partnership while talking about the Quest 3 as an entertainment device for games and TV – but Cloud Gaming goes a long way toward this being a truly great console.

Lego Bricktales is an existing game, not something brand-new — but Meta will let you play it in your living room with the Quest 3. The company just showed off some pre-recorded video of it captured with the headset.

After last year’s Quest Pro kind of flopped you might have thought there would be less discussion of mixed reality and the metaverse, but nope. Zuckerberg opened the Meta Connect developer conference talking about how the Quest 3 is a mixed reality headset for everyone.

Zuckerberg is talking about the big vision for mixed reality here, in which rooms are filled with both real and virtual objects. You’ll go to a meeting with some IRL people, he says, plus some holograms and some AI bots as well. It’s digital, it’s virtual, it’s all happening in real world.

Some deeply confusing timer situations, but now Mark Zuckerberg is on stage and it appears we’re going to get some news for real.

We’re just minutes away from Meta Connect, and Reuters is reporting that Alexis Black Bjorlin, the executive overseeing the company’s AI chip efforts, is getting replaced by Yee Jiun Song, Meta’s vice president of engineering.

Though the stream is delayed, you can see our first impressions of Meta’s headlining hardware product — the $499 Quest 3, shipping October 10th — here.

The stream will begin in 27 minutes, at 10:30AM PT instead of 10AM PT as originally planned. Here’s the link.

Carmack has delivered an unscripted talk at every Oculus / Meta Connect that I can remember, but he left Meta late last year after a particularly grumpy tell-all. He’s focusing on AI (and not the newfangled generative variety) at his startup, Keen Technologies.

The Connect keynote starts in about 20 minutes, and it’s likely to be a busy one! We’re obviously going to hear all the details on the Quest 3, potentially see some new Ray-Ban Stories glasses, and there will definitely definitely definitely be a lot of talk about generative AI. Meta doesn’t typically get mentioned alongside ChatGPT and Bing and even Snap’s My AI stuff... but you can bet it would like to change that.