In a highly choreographed Instagram post in the last few days, complete with wife/kids and parents involved, Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of new AI’s to his platforms.

The 28 new AI’s will have unique interests and personalities and be played by cultural icons and influencers, including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka. 

Although still in the beta phase, the new AI’s will soon be available across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. 

In addition to this, Meta is also planning to introduce a series of new AI experiences across its family of Apps and devices, it unveiled at its annual Connect conference last week.

META AI RELEASE DATE

This includes Meta AI in beta, an advanced conversational assistant that’s available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and is coming to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. The tool can give users real-time information and generate photorealistic images from text prompts in seconds to share with friends. 

In addition to AI stickers, which will allow users the ability to be able to edit their own images or even co-create them with friends on Instagram using new AI editing tools. 

In a statement, Meta said: “AI is enabling new forms of connection and expression, thanks to the power of generative technologies. And today at Connect, we introduced you to new AI experiences and features that can enhance your connections with others – and give you the tools to be more creative, expressive, and productive.”

INTRODUCING: META’S 28 NEW AI’S

“Our journey with AIs is just beginning,” said Meta in a statement. “And it isn’t purely about building AIs that only answer questions. We’ve been creating AIs that have more personality, opinions, and interests, and are a bit more fun to interact with,” it said.

Along with Meta AI, there are 28 more AIs that users can message on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The social media giant said to think of these AIs “as a new cast of characters – all with unique backstories”.

It said because interacting with them should feel like talking to familiar people, Meta has partnered with cultural icons and influencers to play and embody some of these AIs. They’ll each have profiles on Instagram and Facebook, so users can explore what they’re all about. 

• Charli D’Amelio as Coco, Dance enthusiast
• Chris Paul as Perry, Pro golfer helping you perfect your stroke
• Dwyane Wade as Victor, Ironman triathlete motivating you to be your best self
• Izzy Adesanya as Luiz, Showy MMA prospect who can back up his trash talk
• Kendall Jenner as Billie, No-BS, ride-or-die companion
• LaurDIY as Dylan, Quirky DIY and Craft expert and companion for Gen Z
• MrBeast as Zach, The big brother who will roast you — because he cares
• Naomi Osaka as Tamika, Anime-obsessed Sailor Senshi in training
• Paris Hilton as Amber, Detective partner for solving whodunnits
• Raven Ross as Angie, Workout class queen who balances fitness with meditation
• Roy Choi as Max, Seasoned sous chef for culinary tips and tricks
• Sam Kerr as Sally, Free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath
• Snoop Dogg as Dungeon Master, Choose your own adventure with the Dungeon Master
• Tom Brady as Bru, Wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches

“We’re going to start rolling these out in beta in the United States today. We’ll add new characters in the coming weeks played by Bear Grylls, Chloe Kim, and Josh Richards among others,” said the social media firm.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR BUSINESS?

Businesses will be able to create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences. From small businesses looking to scale to large brands wanting to enhance communications, Meta says AIs will be able to help businesses engage with their customers across its apps. “We’re launching this in alpha and will scale it further next year,” the firm said.

“We introduced AI studio today, the platform that supports the creation of our AIs and we plan to make it available for people outside of Meta – coders and non-coders alike – to build AIs. Developers will be able to build third-party AIs for our messaging services with our APIs in the coming weeks, starting on Messenger then expanding to WhatsApp,” it added.

And for creators, they’ll be able to build AIs that extend their Virtual presence across the apps. These AIs will have to be sanctioned by them and directly controlled by the creator. 

“We’re also building a sandbox that will be released in the coming year, enabling anyone to experiment with creating their own AI. As our universe of AIs continues to grow and evolve, we’ll bring this sandbox to the Metaverse, giving you the chance to build AIs that adopt an even greater level of realism, embodiment, and connectedness,” Meta added in a statement.

But with a big push into AI, this begs the question – what’s happened to the ‘Meta’verse? 

The metaverse was the much-hyped virtual world reality set to change the way we exist, communicate and interact and the reason Facebook went through a multi-billion pound rebrand to call itself Meta…much to the dismay of shareholders.

In 2021 and 2022, Reality Labs, the division housing metaverse projects, recorded a loss of almost $24bn. And after an explosion in talk about the metaverse in 2021 and 2022, chat around it went decidedly quiet in 2023. 

Headlines earlier this year proclaimed: ‘Mark Zuckerberg quietly buries the metaverse’ and this life-changing, immersive world technology suddenly seemed like old news. 

At the same time, generative AI chatbot ChatGPT soared into the limelight (and headlines) to become the fastest-growing app in history earlier this year, reaching over 100m users in less than 3 months. This record has since been overtaken by Meta-owned Twitter (X) rival Threads.

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Generative AI technology is not new. It has been quietly used by Google internally for a number of years. Meta clearly had the use of this technology too. But the sheer growth and momentum has taken even the social media giants like Meta and Google off guard. 

At the company’s Connect conference, Zuckerberg was quick to relay all the company’s incredible innovations in the AI world, so as not to appear out of touch. But he admitted earlier this year that Meta needed to “turbocharge” its work in this area. 

In a Facebook post, he said “We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI. We’re starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology. 

“In the short term, we’ll focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways,” he added.

Google has also started rapidly rolling out generative-AI driven search functions, which will impact how users search for content and fundamentally change the role of Search in the future.

However, despite this push into AI, not all is lost. Zuckerberg was excited to debut Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset ($499) during the conference, which they will begin shipping in October. The company also shared the growth of its VR app store – Quest Store – which has generated $2bn in sales since it launched in 2019, up from $1.5bn the year before. 

But these virtual world reality headsets will be aimed at a more targeted audience, such as video gamers or the crypto world. 

News of the headset was also of increased interest, due to the fact Apple announced the launch of its own Vision Pro mixed-reality headset in June. However, their price comes in at an eye-watering $3,499. It is due to go on sale next year.

But despite the furore around the metaverse and virtual reality dampening down, businesses still see a role for it in the future. The world’s biggest retailer Walmart announced only last week that it plans to ‘aggressively pursue’ new virtual world opportunities in the metaverse.

“As the lines between physical and virtual continue to blur, we want to meet our customers where they’re spending more and more of their time. Increasingly, that includes virtual worlds,” the retail giant said in a statement. 

Citi estimates that the total market for metaverse-related commercial activity will be between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, with total metaverse users numbering around five billion.

So, despite a change in strategy from the Meta boss, all is still to play for in the battle of new technology amongst the giants. But one thing is for certain, the sheer pace of change is unprecedented. 

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