Meet the Meta AI cinematic universe

What do Jane Austen, Tom Brady, and MrBeast have in common?

They’re all among the celebrities and historical figures that Meta is turning into AI characters as part of a quirky new push to add automated lifelike personalities to its messaging apps. It’s just one of the many ways the social media giant plans to weave generative AI into its platforms, it announced this week at Meta Connect.

Whereas many of its big tech rivals are focused on molding AI into unifying all-purpose digital assistants, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta takes a more-the-merrier approach when it comes to bots.

“We don’t think that there’s going to be like one singular superintelligence that everyone interacts with,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote. “But our view is that people are going to want to interact with a bunch of different AIs for the different things that you want to do.”

Here’s a—relatively—quick rundown of all the ways Meta wants to introduce AI to its users:

• Meta is rolling out 28 new AI characters that can interact with users, including some with the likenesses of public figures. For example, Naomi Osaka plays Tamika, an “anime-obsessed cosplay expert;” Snoop Dogg is the Dungeon Master, an “adventurous storyteller;” and Paris Hilton is Amber, a “detective partner for solving whodunnits.” Users can message with these characters or follow their Instagram or Facebook profiles.
• The company is tapping a new image generation model called Emu—to complement Meta’s large language model (LLM), Llama—to generate custom emoji stickers in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook Stories.
• Following the lead of Adobe’s Firefly, Meta is adding new AI tools to image editing in Instagram, including custom backgrounds or stylization.
• In an effort not to be outdone by Microsoft Copilot and Google Bard, a new assistant called Meta AI will help and chat with users across all of Meta’s properties. The tool is based on Llama and has a search partnership with Microsoft Bing.
• Meta AI will be integrated into the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses refresh and its forthcoming Quest 3 AR/VR headset.

Zuckerberg thinks the rollout will help put a human face—or many—on AI and make it more accessible to the company’s billions of users. The announcements also position Meta in a different lane than rivals like Microsoft and Google, which have been leading the AI arms race thus far.

“If you look across the industry, and if you look at what everyone is doing, most people haven’t yet had the chance to experience these LLMs or any of these AI advances yet,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s the thing that I think that we can help change.”

Meta’s AI fascination was so apparent at the conference that it arguably overshadowed some of the company’s previous pet obsessions—like the one Zuck named the company after.

“Absent was the term ‘metaverse,’ which was referenced just a couple of times, at best. There were no updates about Horizon Worlds,” Forrester VP and research director Mike Proulx said in a note a spokesperson emailed to Tech Brew.