The Future is a Combination of the Physical and Digital: Meta AI’s Visions for the Next Decade, or When the Time Will Come

There are still many people without experience with these advances. According to Zuckerberg, Meta has done a lot of testing and red-teaming to make sure its AI bots aren’t problematic, but he also said the company is rolling its new products out more slowly than usual.

Meta has been working on the idea of merging virtual and physical space for years. But the speech was markedly different from his presentation in 2021. He promised that in the next decade most people would use a fully-immersed, 3D version of the internet. He wore a Virtual Reality headset in the keynote to play poker with his friends in space. It showed cards and players floating in zero gravity as it played up the wonder of meeting up.

I think by the year 2020 we will be at a point where you are going to be with some of your friends, and others may be in holograms, and they will feel the same as everyone else. Or you’ll walk into a meeting and sit down at a table. There will be people who are in the room, holograms, but also people who are in the room helping each other with different things. He said there will be a bunch of artificial intelligence guys in the room who are helping you with different things.

At Meta Connect 2023, he shifted how he talks about the metaverse, but still hasn’t given up. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. He wants the public to believe that the future is a combination of the physical and digital.

Zuckerberg’s AI presentation this week departed even further from his original mission. Meta is racing to create a robot that will be super smart, and the idea is to put them in social feeds. Humans do things like posting stories as characters in virtual worlds. You will also find that a new contact has elbowed in among your friends and others you may follow, in the form of a chatbot called Meta AI that answers questions like ChatGPT does. This electronic interloper can even join in on your group chats.

Many companies have abandoned the metaverse in the way that Meta does. It is right there in the name. The metaverse has always been a slippery term. Is it VR? Is it a computer program? Is that a video game? The best answer might be that whatever Meta does is the metaverse, by definition — at least for Mark Zuckerberg.

Khari Johnson at GadgetLab: AI Arms Against Robotic Bose-Einstein Cosmic Glasses And Wearable Devices

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED senior AI writer Khari Johnson about the mixed reality hardware Meta announced this week, its voice-controlled smart glasses, its weird new AI chatbots, and where the company sits in the great AI arms race.

Read Khari’s story about Meta’s many AI chatbots. Read Lauren’s story about the upcoming Meta Quest 3 headset and chatbot-enabled Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Khari Johnson has a verified account on social media. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). The theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Mark Zuckerberg believes in mixed reality: Why the Meta Quest 3 fails to deliver a great AI experience for enterprise users? A review of Zuckerberg’s keynote at Meta Connect

The answer came in Zuckerberg’s bifurcated presentation at the Meta Connect event this week. He believes in mixed reality. The Meta Quest 3 is better than the “Pro” helmet the company abandoned because it has a really good augmented reality experience. It was promised that after a long time every room will have more holograms than physical objects and a profusion of digital objects that will become layers on top of the physical world. After that bold prediction, he made an awkward pivot to Meta’s AI efforts, turning from a technology that has left many consumers indifferent to one that no one can get enough of. This was the moment when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his brand new approach to artificial intelligence. It is to use Meta’s advanced large language models to create chatbots and inject them into various social platforms.

Recently that messaging has shifted. A couple of weeks ago I got a demo of the Quest 3. A bunch of product managers and execs talked for over an hour about the headset and the new applications. But there was not a single mention of any improved social experience. One might have expected at the least a ground-up makeover of Horizon Worlds, since reports coming out of Meta have shown executives complaining that even employees ordered to use the app have been avoiding it. When I asked about the omission, the executives hemmed and hawed. Social experiences were hardly mentioned in this week’s keynote.