On September 25th, Meta unveiled a ton of AI-related products and developments at its Connect event.
The company shined the spotlight on its Orion augmented reality (AR) glasses prototype. But there were also other important updates that got overshadowed by the flashy, but distant, AR product.
What’s actually worth paying attention to from Meta Connect 2024?
I got the scoop from Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 117 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
Orion AR Glasses: A (Distant) Vision of the Future
It’s clear that Meta wanted Orion to be the start of the show. The glasses resemble regular eyewear, but include advanced projection technology and generative AI capabilities to create extremely light, wearable, and capable AR eyewear.
But Orion is not remotely close to being a consumer product.
Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth posted on X about Orion:
We just unveiled Orion, our full AR glasses prototype that we've been working on for nearly a decade. When we started on this journey, our teams predicted that we had a 10% chance (at best) of success.
— Boz (@boztank) September 25, 2024
This was our project to see if our dream AR glasses—wide FOV display, less… pic.twitter.com/wrKbjLri6k
“I think the key thing people have to know is these glasses are not coming any time soon,” says Roetzer.
He’s also not bullish on Meta’s ability to pull this off. CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears obsessed with reducing his dependence on other platforms, like Apple’s App Store. So he wants to control the platform of the future (which, he seems to hope, will be AR wearables).
Still, Meta faces huge hurdles in manufacturing at scale compared to competitors like Apple and Google. While it's unwise to bet against Zuckerberg's vision and resources, Roetzer believes Apple and Google have advantages in chips, batteries, supply chain, and manufacturing expertise.
"If I'm placing futures on who wins for glasses, it's not Meta, in my opinion," Roetzer says. "I'm betting on Apple and Google in this one."
Llama 3.2: The Overlooked Star
While Orion dominated headlines, Meta's announcement of Llama 3.2 might have more immediate impact, including:
- New 11 billion and 90 billion parameter models capable of processing and reasoning about images.
- Performance comparable to closed models on various benchmarks.
- 1 billion and 3 billion parameter models designed for edge and mobile devices.
It’s just the latest set of impressive innovations in Meta’s quest to dominate the open AI ecosystem—and probably more worth paying attention to than Orion at the moment.
“They cannibalized their own news [about Llama] with a product that, obviously, Zuckerberg just wanted to show off,” says Roetzer.
And, lest we forget in the Orion hype, the company also made several other announcements, including:
- Quest 3S VR Headset: A new virtual reality headset priced at $299.99.
- Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Update: Improved AI responsiveness in existing smart glasses.
- AI-Generated Content: Facebook and Instagram are testing AI-generated content within their platforms.
- Celebrity AI Voices: New celebrity voices available for Meta's AI chatbots.
Mike Kaput
As Chief Content Officer, Mike Kaput uses content marketing, marketing strategy, and marketing technology to grow and scale traffic, leads, and revenue for Marketing AI Institute. Mike is the co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing and the Future of Business (Matt Holt Books, 2022). See Mike's full bio.