David Pierce

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.