meta has launched new products, focusing on ar and ai
2024-09-26
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"i thought the metaverse would be possible before ai. it's an interesting twist of fate, as ai exploded before the metaverse became truly popular," mark zuckerberg said with emotion at the meta connect 2024 developer conference in the early morning of september 26, beijing time.
meta, which once encountered difficulties in the field of the metaverse, successfully reversed its fate in 2024 with generative ai. on september 26, after the press conference, meta's stock price once reached a record high, and finally rose by 0.88% to close at us$568.31 per share, with a total market value of us$1.44 trillion. since the beginning of this year, meta's stock price has risen by more than 60%.
at this conference, meta still attached great importance to products in the field of metaverse, and released the holographic ar glasses orion, which is the most concerned new product in the industry. it is reported that its cost is as high as 10,000 us dollars and is not available for sale. in addition, meta released the affordable version of quest 3s head display device, and updated the ai large model llama to version 3.2, providing visual multimodal capabilities and adding ai voice dialogue capabilities ai voice, which complements the mainstream multimodal functions.
after the press conference, jpmorgan chase announced that it was optimistic about meta and raised its target price from $610 to $640. in early august, jpmorgan chase published a report raising meta's target price from $480 to $610. the report pointed out that meta has performed well recently and believed that it has invested appropriately in key long-term plans, especially ai.
meta, which focuses on ar and ai, will return to the top ten in the us stock market in 2024. thanks to this, zuckerberg has also recently entered the $200 billion club due to his increased personal wealth. there are currently only three people in this club in the world, the other two are tesla ceo musk and amazon founder bezos.
cost-effectiveness and performance
cost-effectiveness is the key word of meta's press conference.
at the conference, zuckerberg first introduced the most cost-effective product, quest 3s, which is equivalent to the affordable version of the quest series. it starts at us$299.99 (about rmb 2,100), which is us$200 cheaper than the quest 3 released last year. it will be available on october 15.
according to reports, the reason for the sharp drop in the price of quest 3s is that meta replaced the pancake lens with the infinite lens. meta said that quest 3s has multi-tasking capabilities and can run multiple apps at the same time, making it a multi-tasking computer.
in addition, meta announced a price cut for last year's quest 3, reducing the price of the 512gb version from us$650 to us$500 (approximately rmb 3,516), and will stop producing the quest pro released in 2022. this device costs as much as us$999, but has failed to gain much development since its release.
some analysts believe that the poor sales of apple's nearly $3,500 vision pro have caused meta to shelve the more expensive quest model and instead choose a cheaper product to promote the popularity of headsets.
in contrast to the cost-effectiveness, zuckerberg grandly introduced orion, which is known as "the most advanced glasses to date" at the meeting. this is a product that meta spent ten years to develop. it is reported that the production cost of each pair of glasses is about us$10,000 (about rmb 70,000), which may also be the most expensive ar glasses on the market.
the appearance of orion glasses is similar to that of ordinary sunglasses and weighs 98 grams, but to work properly, they need to work with a gesture tracking bracelet and a remote control-sized computing body. it is reported that orion is compatible with meta's self-developed electromyographic bracelet and has multiple interaction methods such as hand tracking, eye tracking, and head tracking. according to the demonstration, users can use orion to browse the web, watch short dramas, and play some simple 3d games.
at present, orion is just a prototype product, with only about 1,000 pairs produced, and it will not be officially sold to the public in the short term. in a blog on the official website, meta said that orion will focus on internal development first, rather than rushing to put it on the shelves.
however, orion's first batch of users already exist, including nvidia ceo huang renxun. zuckerberg played a video of a group of friends trying on the ar glasses. huang renxun said during the experience, "the display is great, the tracking is great, and the color is great."
"when we actually started making these glasses, i felt like this was almost a practical project for the ultimate ar." zuckerberg believes that orion represents the final form of ar glasses, and mature ar glasses have enough computing power so that users can leave their smartphones at home. regardless of the effect, this will be a new entrance to the future metaverse world.
new multi-modal features
in addition to the vision of the metaverse, meta is also promoting the implementation of generative ai. zuckerberg announced the 3.2 version update of its basic open source model llama, which includes 90b and 11b parameter visual large language models, as well as 1b and 3b parameter lightweight plain text models, the latter suitable for edge and mobile devices.
in july this year, meta released llama 3.1, which includes three parameter sizes: 8b, 70b, and 405b. currently, meta's llama model is being updated every two to three months.
llama 3.2 can be understood as a multimodal version of llama 3.1. the llama 3.2 11b and 90b models support text and image input, and have image and visual understanding capabilities. in the test results given by meta, the graphical reasoning ability of the 90b version of llama 3.2 is ahead of gpt 4o-mini in multiple tests. the 11b version completely surpasses the small version of claude 3, the haiku version.
on the other hand, through pruning and distillation, meta launched the first batch of lightweight llama models that can efficiently adapt to devices and have high capabilities. they only support text input and a context length of 128k tokens. it is reported that this model is adapted to qualcomm and mediatek hardware and optimized for arm processors.
meta said these lightweight models enable developers to build personalized device agent applications with strong privacy, and data does not leave the device. in application, such an application can help users summarize the last 10 messages received, extract action items, and use tool calls to directly send calendar invitations for follow-up meetings.
in addition to multimodal image understanding, meta also launched meta ai voice, following openai. in the live demonstration, it supports conversation interruption like gpt-4o, and the voice is also natural, but without rich intonation and emotional expression. "compared with text, using voice to interact with ai is a better way." zuckerberg said.
it is worth mentioning that gpt-4o's previous voice was involved in an infringement dispute because it was suspected to be actress scarlett johansson. meta ai voice learned from the previous experience and purchased the voice copyright from celebrities and provided voice options of 5 celebrities. according to foreign media reports, meta has paid millions of dollars for each celebrity's voice.
meta also released the latest user data of the chatbot meta ai. according to reports, more than 400 million people use meta ai every month, and the number of users reaches 185 million per week. zuckerberg also revealed that meta is testing a translation tool that will automatically translate the audio in the short video app reels through automatic dubbing and lip syncing.
meta is also using ai to optimize its ad generation tools for businesses. according to reports, in the past august, more than 1 million advertisers have used meta's ad generation tools and used them to create 15 million ads. data shows that compared with campaigns that do not use these features, campaigns using meta's generative ai ad features have an average click-through rate of 11% higher and a conversion rate of 7.6% higher.
meta is on the fast track of growth in 2024. in august this year, meta released its 2024 q2 financial report, which showed that the company's revenue was us$39.071 billion, a year-on-year increase of 22%; net profit was us$13.465 billion, a year-on-year increase of 73%, both exceeding wall street analysts' expectations. meta expects that the company's total revenue in the third quarter of 2024 will reach between us$38.5 billion and us$41 billion, which also exceeds analysts' expectations.
(this article comes from china business network)
