Zuckerberg offers an AI metaverse with no language barriers • The Register

Meta has had a bad start to the year.

When it revealed its audience growth was at a standstill and it had already sunk more than $10bn into metaverse technologies, its share price plummeted 27 per cent. More than $230bn of Meta’s market cap evaporated. In social media, if you aren’t growing, you’re dying.

For Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse can’t come soon enough. This CEO is all in on Facebook’s transformation from a dull website and app into a bright 3D world, where friends can hang out in virtual environments they create and bend at will. To turn his vision into reality, and make the metaverse a success, Meta is investing heavily in AI to power it.

“The kinds of experiences that you’ll have in the metaverse are beyond what is possible today,” Zuckerberg said on Monday during a very meta event showcasing a few of the AI systems that will drive the new Facebook 2.0.

“It’s an immersive version of the internet. Instead of just looking at something on a screen, you’re going to actually feel like you’re inside or right there present with another person. And that’s going to require advances across a whole range of areas, from new hardware devices to software for building and exploring worlds. And the key to unlocking a lot of these is advances in AI.”

The core challenge of building the metaverse is making the transition from the physical to the virtual world as seamless as possible. In the future, Meta denizens will don AR glasses and VR goggles to navigate these made-up environments, and use a range of artificially intelligence technologies to interact with one another.

One important entity in all of this, for example, is an all-seeing and all-knowing AI assistant. Meta announced Project CAIRoke, a model designed for developing smart chat bots that operate in the metaverse. Zuckerberg demonstrated directing a robot called Builder Bot…