• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 27, 2023

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the company's first consumer-facing generative artificial intelligence (GAI) products on Wednesday at the company's annual engineering conference, Meta Connect.

"A big part of this innovation is about making sure that these technologies are accessible to everyone," Zuckerberg said. His statement referred to making the products affordable to all.

The company introduced Meta AI in beta, describing it as “an advanced conversational assistant” available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. It will soon come to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3.

Meta engineers used a custom model based on the Llama 2 large language model that the company released for public use in July. The chatbot will have access to real-time information via a partnership with Microsoft's Bing search engine, Zuckerberg said.

Through the partnership with Microsoft, the conversational assistant returns real-time information and generates photorealistic images from text prompts in seconds. For now, it is only available in the United States.

Meta also will launch 28 more AIs in beta, with icons and influencers such as Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka — each with specific topics and interests, from sports to cooking.

The plan also is to launch AIs for businesses and creators, and to release the AI Studio for developers and businesses to create their own AI chatbots for the company’s messaging services on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

Starting with Messenger, AI Studio will allow companies to “create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences,” according to the company. It is only available in alpha to start.

Two new features coming to Instagram will use the technology from Emu. Backdrop also leverages learnings from Meta’s Segment Anything Model. 

Restyle enables users to reimagine images by applying the visual styles described through keywords like “watercolor” as a descriptor or a more detailed prompt like “collage from magazines and newspapers, torn edges” to describe the new look and feel of the image you want to create. 

These experiences come with new challenges, so Meta will continue to build in safeguards as it introduces and tests the technology.

Along with the AI product releases, news broke today that a Meta executive overseeing the company's efforts to develop its own chips for its AI work is leaving her position at the end of the month.

Reuters cited two sources familiar with the matter who said Alexis Black Bjorlin, vice president of infrastructure at Meta, headed a team charged with designing a custom chip to handle a range of AI work. She also worked at chip companies Broadcom and Intel.

Black Bjorlin is leaving her position at the end of the month but not immediately leaving the company, one source told Reuters.