First we run through the greatest hits of the Code Conference (including Linda Yaccarino’s interview, which was ... something!). Then we catch up on all the news from Meta Connect, how Hollywood is approaching AI and data going forward, the Logitech racing chair of Nilay’s dreams, and much more. It’s The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of publishing late today.
Meta is touting Meta AI’s ability to talk to Bing when answering your questions. ChatGPT just (re-)acquired the ability to browse the web, too. If these AI bots really are going to change the way we find information — and I think they might — this kind of real-time web access is going to be a huge part of it.
I’m pretty sure Supernatural is the app I’ve used most on my Quest 2 — it’s an awesome fitness app, and its price just got cut from $18.99 a month to $9.99. (You can also pay $99.99 a year.) This might be the most exciting news of today, at least when it comes to my budget.
He spent more than an hour with The Verge’s Alex Heath talking about everything from AI to Threads to X to the future of smart glasses and the Quest 3. Alex and Zuck tend to cover a lot of ground whenever they sit down to talk, and this is a great chat. You can watch it on YouTube, or listen anywhere you get podcasts. Don’t miss it!
Zuckerberg’s three things for the day were the Quest 3, all the AI bots, and the smart glasses. He’s recapping now, and says that actually the glasses are kind of the end point — put AI and Quest together, solve some hardware problems, and smart glasses are the thing. And with that it appears we’re done with Zuckerberg!
Next up: CTO Andrew Bosworth to talk about some of the far-future stuff Meta’s working on and dive a little deeper into the products themselves./
Zuckerberg says Meta has done a lot of testing and red-teaming to make sure its AI bots aren’t problematic, but he also acknowledges that this stuff is hard and complicated. That’s why, he says, Meta’s rolling its new products out a little more slowly than usual.
This seems like a good idea! Meta knows better than just about anybody how problematic fake information can be, and how hard it is to guess all the ways people will use your new stuff. Move slow and don’t break things.
In white, actually, which looks good on the Ultra. This is not an important piece of information for you to know — and it’s hardly surprising that Zuck is Team Android and not Team Apple — but I just figured I’d share.
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.
Don’t miss Alex Heath’s deep dive on all of Meta’s big chatbot plans, which are remarkably ambitious.
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.
