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.
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.
And, Zuck reminds us, he loves the real world. The real world is great.
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.
Personally all I want is for the Portal line to come back. But I don’t think I’m getting that one.
This week I bought a DVD, for journalism. Because with Netflix’s disc-delivery service coming to an end, we wanted to know: what’s next for physical movies and TV? We asked Redbox’s owner that very question. Then we talked about streaming metrics, why they matter, and whether they actually mean anything at all.
(Also, we wrapped this episode just before the news hit that the writers’ strike was over. We’ll have lots more on that later this week.)
The Hollywood Reporter has a good read this morning on the last-minute negotiations to end the writers strike. It seems to come pretty much entirely from the studios’ perspective, but it’s a good read anyway.
Apparently the writers guild and the studios were barely even negotiating — everybody was waiting on the other side to make a move. But with the help of some showrunners and some late-night negotiating, a deal finally got done. And then almost fell apart. And then finally got done for real.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
