Mark Zuckerberg / Instagram
Meta has made some major announcements on the AI front over the past week.
It started with Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing the new Meta AI assistant built on Llama 3 which they believe can and will surpass the capabilities of ChatGPT. On the AI-powered hardware front, Mark Zuckerberg announced new functionality for the Meta x Ray-Ban AI-powered smart glasses on Tuesday morning and the addition of ‘Vision’ to Meta AI which will allow users to ask questions about what they are looking at in real time.
During that latter announcement, Mark Zuckerberg explained the golf chain he’s been wearing on camera in recent days that has the Internet making thousands of memes, memes that often include a beard filter on the Meta CEO. Zuckerberg tells Instagram’s Eva Chen this is part 1 of his plan with chains. He’s actually working on a long-term chain that will feature the prayer he reads to his daughters at bedtime every night:
That video illustrates how the Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses are able to do video calls through WhatsApp now. Eva Chen at Instagram calls him wearing the Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses and she’s the one who asks him about the chain.
Zuckerberg tells her that he’s working with a designer on a long-term chain but with his design process he wants to try out a bunch of different chains and get a sense of the colors, materials, thickness, and “all the different things” while he’s “dialing in the long-term one.” We’re inching closer and closer to the ‘dripped out Mark Zuckerberg‘ that went viral days ago:
Instagram/Mark Zuckerberg
On Threads, Zuckerberg also revealed the new Meta x Ray-Ban smart glasses update. He wrote “You can now use the glasses to video call someone on WhatsApp and Messenger. And we’re continuing to bring the multimodal features to more people in the US and Canada so you can use Meta AI to give you more information about what you’re seeing. Pretty awesome.”
On Facebook, the new Meta AI chat feature is already available within posts in NewsFeed. I’ve tinkered with it and asked it to digest articles before clicking to read. I’ve been impressed by the results thus far and will be interested to see how far this goes.