Mark Zuckerberg to Open Connect Conference with Emphasis on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality

The Connect developer conference of tech giant Meta will commence on Wednesday, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will emphasize virtual and augmented reality as well as artificial intelligence.

The company, which renamed itself Meta two years ago, is expected to unveil the next version of its virtual reality headset, the Quest 3, and discuss AI chatbots and other tools and features designed to keep users engaged on Facebook and Instagram as competition from TikTok continues. . This remains Meta’s biggest challenge, said Insider Intelligence analyst Yoram Wurmser.

“A lot of this effort around chatbots and stories and other ways of just continuing to engage (like AI-driven personalization and things like that), that’s an overall challenge for the company,” he said.

Squeezed by the online advertising recession and the uncertainty of the global economy, Meta has cut more than 20,000 jobs since last November. Zuckerberg called 2023 the company’s “year of efficiency” as it reduces its workforce and focuses more on technical hires such as AI experts to focus on Meta’s long-term vision.

Artificial intelligence is a key part of this vision. Over the summer, Meta released the next generation of the big language model for artificial intelligence and made the Llama 2 technology free for research and commercial use.

Just like with Google and Microsoft technology, Metal has long had a large group of computer science researchers dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence technology. But that has been overshadowed by the launch of ChatGPT, which sparked a rush to take advantage of “generative AI” tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Zuckerberg said at the time that people can download its new AI models directly or through a partnership that makes them available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform “along with Microsoft’s security and content tools.”