I used to think that the metaverse could be realized before the emergence of AI. The turning point of fate is very interesting, but AI exploded before the metaverse truly became popular, "Mark Zuckerberg sighed at the Meta Connect 2024 developer conference in the early morning of September 26th Beijing time.
Meta, which once faced difficulties in the metaverse field, successfully reversed its fate in 2024 with its generative AI. On September 26th, after the press conference, Meta's stock price reached a historic high, ultimately rising 0.88% to close at $568.31 per share, with a total market value of $1.44 trillion. Since the beginning of this year, Meta's stock price has risen by over 60%.
At this press conference, Meta still values products in the metaverse field and has released the holographic AR glasses Orion, which is the most anticipated new product in the industry. It is reported that its cost is as high as $10000 and it is currently not available for sale to the public. In addition, Meta has released an affordable version of the Quest 3S headset device and updated the AI large model Llama to version 3.2, providing visual multimodal capabilities and adding AI voice dialogue capabilities, AI Voice, to complement mainstream multimodal features.
After the press conference, JPMorgan announced its optimism about Meta and raised its target price from $610 to $640. In early August, JPMorgan Chase released a report raising Meta's target price from $480 to $610. The report stated that Meta has performed well recently and believes that it has made appropriate investments in key long-term plans, especially AI.
Meta, which focuses on both 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 personal wealth increase. Currently, there are only three members in this club worldwide, the other two being Tesla CEO Musk and Amazon founder Bezos.
Volume 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 $299.99 (about 2100 yuan), which is $200 cheaper than the Quest 3 released at the same time last year. It will be launched on October 15th.
It is reported that the reason for the significant price drop of Quest 3S is that Meta has replaced the Pancake lens with an Infinite lens. Meta stated that Quest 3S has multitasking capabilities and can run multiple apps simultaneously, making it a multitasking computer.
In addition, Meta announced a price reduction for the Quest 3 launched last year, lowering the price of the 512GB version from $650 to $500 (approximately RMB 3516), and will cease production of the Quest Pro released in 2022, which is priced at $999 but has not seen much development since its release.
Some analysts believe that the dismal sales of Apple's nearly $3500 Vision Pro have led Meta to shelve the more expensive Quest model and instead choose cheaper products, driving the popularity of headsets.
In contrast to cost-effectiveness, Zuckerberg introduced Orion, known as the "most advanced glasses to date," at the meeting. It is a product that Meta spent ten years building, and it is reported that the production cost of each pair of glasses is about $10000 (about 70000 RMB), which may also be the most expensive AR glasses on the market.
The appearance of Orion glasses is similar to a regular sunglasses, weighing 98 grams, but to function properly, it requires a gesture tracking wristband and and a remote control sized computing subject to collaborate. It is reported that Orion is compatible with Meta's self-developed electromyographic wristband and and has multiple interactive methods such as hand tracking, eye tracking, and head tracking. According to the demonstration, users can use Orion to browse web pages, watch short dramas, and play some simple 3D games.
At present, Orion is only a prototype product, producing only about 1000 pairs and will not be officially launched for sale in the short term. In its official blog post, Meta stated that Orion will focus on internal development first, rather than rushing to put it on the shelves.
However, the first batch of Orion users have already arrived, including Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun. Zuckerberg played a video of a group of friends trying on this AR glasses on site, and Huang Renxun said during the experience, "The display is great, the tracking is great, and the colors are also very good
When we actually started making these glasses, I thought it was almost a practical project for ultimate AR. Zuckerberg believes that Orion represents the ultimate 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 multimodal functionality
In addition to the imagination of the metaverse, Meta is also promoting the landing of generative AI. Zuckerberg announced the 3.2 version update of his basic open-source model Llama, which includes a visual big language model with 90B and 11B parameters, as well as a lightweight plain text model with 1B and 3B parameters, the latter suitable for edge and mobile devices.
In July of this year, Meta just released Llama 3.1, which includes three parameter scales: 8B, 70B, and 405B. Currently, Meta's Llama model is being updated at a rate of once every two to three months.
Llama 3.2 can be understood as a multimodal version of Llama 3.1, where Llama 3.2 11B and 90B models support text and image input, with image and visual understanding capabilities. In the test results provided by Meta, the graphical reasoning ability of Llama 3.2's 90B version leads GPT 4o mini in multiple tests. The 11B version completely surpasses the Haiku version of Claude 3.
On the other hand, through pruning and distillation, Meta launched the first lightweight Llama model with high capabilities that can efficiently adapt to devices. It only supports text input and the context length of 128K tokens. It is reported that this the first mock examination is suitable for Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware, and has been optimized for the Arm processor.
Meta states that these lightweight models enable developers to build personalized device proxy applications with strong privacy and data not leaving the device. In terms of applications, such applications can help users summarize the last 10 messages received, extract action items, and use tool calls to directly send calendar invitations for subsequent meetings.
In addition to multimodal image understanding, Meta has also launched Meta AI Voice, closely following OpenAI. In the live demonstration, it, like GPT-4o, can support dialogue interruption and has a natural voice, but lacks rich intonation and emotional expression. Compared to text, interacting with AI through voice is a better way, "Zuckerberg said.
It is worth mentioning that the voice of GPT-4o was previously embroiled in copyright infringement disputes due to suspected actress Scarlett Johnson. Meta AI Voice learned from this experience by purchasing voice copyrights from celebrities and providing voice options for five celebrities. According to foreign media reports, Meta has paid millions of dollars for each celebrity's voice.
Meta also released the latest user data for the chatbot Meta AI. It is reported that over 400 million people use Meta AI every month, with a weekly user count of 185 million. Zuckerberg also revealed that Meta is testing a translation tool that will automatically translate audio from the short video application Reels, synchronizing voice acting and character mouth movements.
Meta is still utilizing AI to optimize its advertising generation tools for enterprises. It is reported that in the past August, over 1 million advertising clients have used Meta's ad generation tools and created 15 million ads using these tools. Data shows that compared to campaigns that do not use these features, campaigns that use Meta generative AI advertising have an average 11% higher click through rate and 7.6% higher conversion rate.
Meta will enter the fast lane of growth in 2024. In August of this year, Meta released its Q2 2024 financial report, which showed that the company's revenue was $39.071 billion, a year-on-year increase of 22%; Net profit was $13.465 billion, a year-on-year increase of 73%, both exceeding Wall Street analysts' expectations. Meta expects the company's total revenue to reach between $38.5 billion and $41 billion in the third quarter of 2024, which also exceeds analysts' expectations.