Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Meta, his social-media-turned-metaverse-turned-artificial intelligence conglomerate, will upgrade its AI assistants to give them a range of celebrity voices, including those of Dame Judi Dench and John Cena. The more important upgrade for Meta’s long-term ambitions, though, is the new ability of its models to see users’ photos and other visual information.
Meta today also announced Llama 3.2, the first version of its free AI models to have visual abilities, broadening their usefulness and relevance for robotics, virtual reality, and so-called AI agents. Some versions of Llama 3.2 are also the first to be optimized to run on mobile devices. This could help developers create AI-powered apps that run on a smartphone and tap into its camera or watch the screen in order to use apps on your behalf.
Given Meta’s enormous reach with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, the assistant upgrade could give many people their first taste of a new generation of more vocal and visually capable AI helpers. Meta said today that more than 180 million people already use Meta AI, as the company’s AI assistant is called, every week.
Meta has lately given its AI a more prominent billing in its apps—for example, making it part of the search bar in Instagram and Messenger. The new celebrity voice options available to users will also include Awkwafina, Keegan Michael Key, and Kristen Bell.
Meta previously gave celebrity personas to text-based assistants, but these characters failed to gain much traction. In July the company launched a tool called AI Studio that lets users create chatbots with any persona they choose. Meta says the new voices will be made available to users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over the next month. The Meta AI image capabilities will be rolled out in the US, but the company did not say when the features might appear in other markets.
The new version of Meta AI will also be able to provide feedback on and information about users’ photos; for example, if you’re unsure what bird you’ve snapped a picture of, it can tell you the species. And it will be able to help edit images by, for instance, adding new backgrounds or details on demand. Google released a similar tool for its Pixel smartphones and for Google Photos in April.
Powering Meta AI’s new capabilities is an upgraded version of Llama, Meta’s premier large language model. The free model announced today may also have a broad impact, given how widely the Llama family has been adopted by developers and startups already.
In contrast to OpenAI’s models, Llama can be downloaded and run locally without charge—although there are some restrictions on large-scale commercial use. Llama can also more easily be fine-tuned, or modified with additional training, for specific tasks.
Patrick Wendell, cofounder and VP of engineering at Databricks, a company that hosts AI models including Llama, says many companies are drawn to open models because they allow them to better protect their own data.
