Facebook parent Meta details next-gen AI investments in event
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Next steps for the metaverse: Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg used a Wednesday event to detail the company's next focus areas in building out its immersive Internet vision, highlighting investments in speech and language artificial intelligence.
The company's Meta AI: Inside the Lab event sought to lay groundwork for the next class of experiences, which will call for major breakthroughs, Meta says.
"The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI," Zuckerberg says.
The company is building a digital voice assistant for interaction with its hardware, including the Portal communications device, its VR headset and eventually its augmented-reality glasses.
Voice assistants are common now, of course, with offerings from tech-giant rivals Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), and Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) most prominent. (Amazon's Alexa, in fact, still handles most voice interactions on Meta's Portal device.)
The needs of the metaverse, however, call for an assistant that can "move between virtual and physical worlds," Zuckerberg says.
Zuckerberg also showed a demo of Meta's "Builder Bot," an AI tool that can create things in (or import them into) a virtual world just through voice commands.
He also described a next-generation approach to chatting with virtual assistants, an AI project the company calls "Project CAIRaoke." It's pursuing more "fluid" conversations using a "fully end-to-end neural model for building on-device assistants."
Zuckerberg also promises to press for inclusion through speech and translation, saying their "No Language Left Behind" system aims to be a single system capable of translating between all written languages, and a Universal Speech Translator looks to offer instant speech-to-speech translation across all languages.
The presentation was long on future benefits, but it's notable to investors who saw that Meta's efforts in future tech - now reorganized into its Reality Labs segment - lost more than $10 billion in 2021.
Meanwhile, with the broader market having moved into correction territory, Meta Platforms fell 1.8% today - its 12th losing session of the past 14. In the three weeks since closing at $323 on Feb. 2 before its earnings report, Meta has fallen 38.6% (see a chart vs. tech rivals and the S&P 500 here).