Meta Connect Blew My Mind - Here's Everything They Shared

So today was the big Meta Connect event and I got to be here in person and demo a lot of the cool stuff that they showed off. We got updates on the meta quest 3. We got updates on the Ray Ban glasses, We got a new model of Llama, we got a really cool new, like, AI speaker tool that was shown off by my good buddy Don Allen Stevenson. There were so many cool announcements. But probably the biggest showstopper of the entire event is what Meta was calling Project Orion, which is an augmented reality set of glasses that looked really, really impressive. So let's go ahead and do a breakdown of the event and dive into all of the cool announcements. And specifically, I'm going to focus on most of the AI announcements, because that's what you probably watch this channel for. But I will quickly give you the overview of kind of everything they talked about. Now, the first major announcement they talked about is the new meta quest 3S. For the most part, it's pretty much the same thing as the meta quest 3, but they changed the hardware specs a little bit to make it less expensive. And The Meta Quest 3 is still out there at 500 bucks. This new version is as low as $300. I actually did get to play around with the Meta Quest 3s, and when using it, it seemed just as good as the meta quest 3 that I have at home. They showed off this like, desktop feature that looked very similar to what they showed off with the Apple Vision Pro. So you can like hook it up to your PC and then have like a 360 degree desktop and put apps all around you and look around at the apps while you're using it. Very similar to what the Apple Vision Pro promised, But, you know, $3,200 cheaper than the Apple Vision Pro. Obviously this is for PC. Apple Vision Pro is if you're using an Apple system, you could be watching videos while playing Spotify, while having a messaging app open and just sort of multitask all around you. Now, this is something that the Apple Vision Pro promised to do. I've used it. I know a lot of people that have used the Apple Vision Pro in that way. Almost nobody that I know, including myself, is still using that. I'm not sure a lot of people really want to have a headset on all day while trying to get work done, but it is a cool feature nonetheless, and I can see some people really, really enjoying this environment. They also upgraded the audio with Dolby Atmos. Again, I tested it. It sounded really, really good. Supposedly you can activate it by just Looking at a Windows keyboard, it will recognize that you're trying to use it with a computer and and then put the screen up in front of you. Haven't seen this feature. Haven't actually tested this myself, but that's pretty cool as well. I did actually get to demo this Batman Arkham Shadow game when I was testing it. And I'll be honest, this game was really, really fun. I didn't want to stop playing it when I was demoing it. I think they slotted out a 30 minute demo for me to test this Meta Quest 3 and I ended up demoing it for about 47 minutes. I know because that's how long my B roll is of me recording myself playing with this. All right, now moving into the AI news here. Meta had a lot of AI announcements. I mean, the majority of the presentation was AI announcements, starting with some new features inside of Meta AI using their new Llama 3.2. They actually showed off the features of the new Meta AI platform before they talked about Llama 3.2. But now inside of Meta AI, it's completely multimodal, so you can actually upload images and it can understand both text and and images. Now, something that we've gotten the ability to do inside of Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini and all the other platforms. But now we have this open source model with llama 3.2 that is also multimodal that can understand images and it's being built into Meta AI. And the example that Zuck gave here was he uploaded a picture of himself jumping and he said, change the shoes to neon roller skates. It gave him the neon roller skates. He said, add blue knee pads and a silver helmet. And you can see here that it went and added the knee pads in the helmet, make the shirt tie dye. It went and changed his shirt to a tie dye. So not only is it multimodal where it understands the image, you can actually tweak and mess around with the images right inside of Meta AI with this new rollout and this I found really interesting. It makes sense why this week is the week that OpenAI rolled out their advanced voice assistant. Maybe they knew this was coming from Meta. Meta rolled out a new AI voice mode inside of their chat apps as well.

We're adding natural voice interactions to Meta AI and you don't have to wait a while. We are rolling this out today and over over the next few days.

But not only did they roll out voice, they decided to roll out voice with celebrity voices. And unlike Scarlett Johansson, these actors actually gave their permission to give their voice to these AIs. We have John Cena and Judi Dench and Kristen Bell and Michael Keegan, Key and Awkwafina are all going to be voices inside of this new voice model. And of course, they had to demo. So this is actually a live demo here of Mark Zuckerberg showing off the new voice feature. So let's take a look real quick.

Hey, are live demos risky?

Live demos can be risky, yes. They can be unpredictable, prone to technical issues, and potentially embarrassing. However, they can also be engaging, memorable.

But I'm going to do it anyway.

Go for it. Just be prepared for anything to happen. Fingers crossed. And that was Awkwafina's voice that we were hearing there. Now, this feature I also thought was really, really cool. And I was super excited to see this because a good buddy of mine, Don Allen Stevenson iii, was the person who actually got to go on stage and give this demo with Zuckerberg. I was so excited for him to see him on stage giving this demo. But you can actually create your own AI sort of clone inside of Meta that's trained on the. You gave it through threads and Instagram and Facebook and all of your meta tools. Here's what that looked like.

Congrats on the new book that you just released. You know, what's the main thing that you're hoping that people take away from it?

Thank you so much.

Yeah, the main thing I want people to take away from my book is the idea that you have the power to create your own opportunities by combining curiosity, adaptability, and resilience in our rapidly evolving digital world. You know, I saw a video of the epic outdoor standing desk that you wrote the book at. Is being in nature and standing desk important for your creative process? Being in nature and using a standing desk is crucial for my creative process. It helps me think more clearly and come up with my best ideas. I'm way more creative and focused when.

I'm outdoors, so that is super, super cool. Now we can do that with things like, hey Gen, already they have a feature that'll do that. There's another company called Delphi that does something very similar, I believe did does that. But seeing this inside of like Instagram and Facebook and the Meta suite of tools is just going to make that stuff so much more mainstream. So people like me, you can go and chat with my virtual Matt Wolf that's trained on all of the sort of AI content that I've published and and ask me questions about AI that's going to be super fun. I can't wait to play with that. So that's a feature that it's not out yet, but they're going to be rolling out soon. And again, couldn't be more excited for my buddy Don Allen, who got to actually demo this on stage. Meta is also rolling out AI translation. So if you're a content creator and you make content for things like reels on Instagram, you can actually now localize it to a whole bunch of different countries by automatically changing the language. And it will actually lip sync to the new language. With coconut, banana and dulce de leche. This recipe was one of the first ones I uploaded to social media a little while ago. I rediscovered it and made a couple of modifications to make it even more delicious. So that looks super cool as well. Now, none of this is sponsored by Meta. I just have to let you know I am genuinely excited to see this stuff. When I was there in person, this was kind of blowing my mind. Now I have seen tools like this before. This all exists in other products like hey Gen, like did, like Synthesia, products like that. But having this built into something like Instagram, where I can just go and upload my reel into Instagram and then have Instagram do that localization and dubbing for me so that it can get pushed out to other countries, that is going to be so cool to get that additional reach. And then after they showed off all this stuff with Meta AI, then they started to go into some more details about the new Llama 3.2 model, which as we already saw is a multimodal model, meaning that you can give it text or you can give it images and it can understand what's going on on either one of them. They're releasing a 90 billion parameter model and an 11 billion parameter model. And we can see examples here, like where it says the prompt is which path to the lake is less steep? It looks at the image, gives a response explaining which path is less steep. And because this is open source, you can actually install this locally on your own machine, not be connected to the Internet, and it's not going to send data anywhere. So for those people, and this is a question I get asked very often about large language models, is if I want to make sure my data is not going to any of these big tech companies and they're not training on anything, I'm asking it, how do I do that? The answer is use one of these open source models and run it locally on your own computer. And now llama 3.2, you can do that with a multimodal model. And then we can see it here actually running on a mobile device. And this is running locally on the device. This isn't using a online service to actually give this back. This is on device inference. So they asked the question and the large language model is just running inside the phone. It didn't have to send it off to like a Meta server somewhere where they can capture that data. It's all just staying in the phone. Then they moved on to start talking about the Meta Ray Bans, which quite honestly is probably my favorite product that Meta has put out in a long time. I've sort of sang the praise of them quite a bit. Never been sponsored by Meta on these glasses. I just use them myself and really like them. I think the camera is great, I think the audio on them is really great. But they just rolled out some new features. It's going to get the new Llama 3.2 model. There's also a ton of features that we haven't seen yet in the glasses. This was another thing that I actually got to demo here at Medic Connect. And let's run through some of the cool new features of these glasses real quick.

Pretty soon you're going to be able to control Spotify and Amazon Music with voice alone. We are also adding new app integrations From Audible and iHeartRadio so that you can easily access more and more content from the glasses. We're making it more natural and conversational. So now instead of having to say, look and tell me when you want to use the camera or use multimodal AI, you're just gonna be able to say, you know, hey, Meta, what kind of smoothie can I make with these? And instead of having to keep saying hey, Meta every time you want to talk to it, you're just gonna be able to keep the conversation going.

Yeah. In the past, if you wanted to actually get information about what you were looking at, you actually had to tell your glasses, hey, Meta, look at this and tell me what I'm seeing. Now you can just say, hey, Meta, what is this? And it knows that you want it to look at whatever is in front of the glasses to give the answer. And instead of having to say hey, Meta, over and over again, once you sort of go into this conversation mode, you just keep on talking with it without having to say hey, Meta, over and over again. That's just a nice, simple quality of life upgrade that makes it easier to feel more conversational with the glasses. One of the other things That I thought was really, really cool about these glasses is they've added the ability to remember things for you. Now, when I did the demo, they had me tell the glasses like, hey, Meta, remind me in 10 minutes to go change the laundry. Hey, Meta, remind me in 15 minutes that this event is starting. And the glasses would remember that. And in the time that you asked it, it would then remind you those things. That seems really, really helpful to me. It also can do that with the image capability of these glasses. So in this example, it says, hey, Meta, remember where I parked? And you can see they parked in spot 9702. So now later on in the day, when they're going and looking for their car, they can go, hey, Meta, where did I park again? And it will tell you, you parked in slot 9702. Or you could just look at the Meta app on your phone and see the image again. Whatever works best for you. That memory feature seems like a really, really helpful feature to have on those glasses. One thing I'd like to try, I don't know if this is going to work or not, but this is something that I think would be really, really cool with these glasses, is if I meet somebody in real life, I can say, hey, Meta, remember that this is Don Allen Stevenson or something like that, right? And then next time I see that person, the distance, I can maybe go, hey, Meta, what was that person's name again? And then it can remind me. I don't know if it's going to be able to do that or not. That's just something I really wish I could see because I meet so many people now that I really, really struggle to remember people's names until I've met them. Two or. It's getting pretty bad, honestly. It can now scan QR codes for you. So you can look at a picture with a QR code and say, hey, Meta, scan this QR code. And if you bust out your phone, it'll just open up the web browser to whatever the QR code was supposed to open to. They're also adding in live translation so somebody can be speaking to you in a different language. The glasses are going to hear it. And then in your ears, repeat back in your desired language. So somebody could speak to me in Spanish. And then in my ears, it will repeat back what they just said to me, but in English. English. They actually demoed this as well. So check this out. Hey.

Hey, how are you?

How is your knee back training doing well?

Knee is, is doing well. It feels strong. I'M ramping up training. How are you doing? Are you getting ready for your next fight? Awesome.

Yes, I am ready. So that could be really cool. Especially if you're both wearing glasses like they did in the demo. If two people are having a conversation with the glasses, then you're both sort of hearing the translated version in each other's heads. Now if I'm wearing the glasses and the person I'm talking to is not, you would use like the companion app. And so I would say something in English, hold up the phone next to the person and then they would hear it translated into Spanish. Coming out of the phone, they would respond, my glasses would hear it translated to English. So it still works even if the other person doesn't have the glasses. But if you're both wearing the glasses, then it's really cool. They also rolled out a new limited edition version of the glasses where you could see through them and see all of the electronics inside of the glasses. They're pretty cool. They're limited. I actually managed to get my hands on a pair. I don't think I'm going to be able to show them off on camera. My camera is not going to focus on them, but they are pretty dang cool looking where you can actually see all of the internal electronics inside of the glasses. So again, the Meta Ray Ban glasses, I now own two pairs of them. The limited edition see through ones and then the ones that I've had forever. Honestly, still my favorite thing Meta has done in a while. I but they are working on something really cool. I mentioned at the beginning, Project Orion, their augmented reality glasses. They made a big deal about it. The dude walked in with a briefcase chained to his arm, pulled out the glasses to hand them to Mark Zuckerberg and then they showed them off. And I mean this is what they look like right here. These are fairly normal looking glasses. I mean they're a little bit chunky and you can see that when the person looks around, you can see the like sort of glare of what's going on inside of the screen. But these glasses have AI built into them. They have cameras built into them, they have speakers built into them, they have a heads up display built into them. You can watch videos on them. Basically the sort of holy grail of glasses. I don't know if you've ever watched my older video where I talked about the ideal pair of glasses would be something that combines what you get in these Ray Ban Meta glasses with what you get in the xreal Air glasses. The xreal Air glasses Sort of have that heads up display where you could watch videos in front of you. These glasses have the AI, the camera, all of that stuff in it. Merge those together, you have something really awesome. That's what these are. But this is a new technology. This is like the way they described it. It's like bending light in a new way to make a projection on the glass in front of you. It's not like a screen sitting in front of your eye like most augmented reality type glasses are right now. This is like normal glasses with these reflections on the glasses showing you what you're seeing in the heads up display. They're pretty crazy technology, but we can see here, this is kind of what you see when you're looking at them. You can see messages. You can see they have like a pie chart on the screen and you can see right through it. They did a demo where they looked at a bunch of foods and said, oh, make me a smoothie recipe with the ingredients that I'm looking at. And it recognized all of the things in front of them and then in the little display there actually made a recipe for them to make that smoothie out of. They demoed having like a voice call with somebody in like a sort of disembodied head. They showed playing like a pong game where you're playing across from somebody and you're bouncing a ball back and forth with each other. You can control it with voice controls. They actually have eye tracking, they have hand tracking and they also have what they're calling a wrist based neural interface where you're wearing this wristband and the glasses don't even have to see your wrists. You can actually make little hand motions like you go like this to scroll, but you can have your hand behind you and the wristband is recognizing the little like movements in your arm to control what you're seeing. They showed off watching videos on here. I got to see a bunch of my buddies actually demo it and they showed their first reactions of it. Here's Don Allen Stevenson trying them, Roberto Nixon trying them on, Cain Calloway trying them on. All of these guys tried them on and they got their sort of first reaction on video and everybody was sort of blown away by what they were seeing from these glasses. Now unfortunately, I don't think we're going to actually see these anytime super soon in our hands. Rumors have it that it's going to be around 2027 before these are actually ready for consumers to buy. The problem is right now the technology in it is so advanced that they're insanely expensive to build, so they've only made around a thousand of them so far for like, demo purposes and for developer purposes. So it's still a little ways off. We still got like a year and a half probably before we actually see something like this go to the actual consumer level where the price point is down enough where people will actually want to buy it. I don't think they want to have like an Apple Vision Pro scenario where they got to sell them for $3,500 just to have a pair of these glasses. They look really, really cool and I'm excited about them and I can't wait to get my hands on them. But we still kind of have a ways to go before we actually get to play with them. They then moved on to the developer portion of the keynote where they were specifically talking to developers and what they can expect in building apps for the meta quest for potentially building apps for the glasses and things like that. But there were some really actually cool things during the developer presentation as well that I was excited to see because it was sort of. I hate this word, but it democratizes some of the development because they're making it easier and easier to develop stuff for their platforms because they're actually adding AI into the development process. And that's the stuff that excited me about the developer portion. For example, they showed off as part of the development process that you can use AI to create assets that you would put inside of your virtual reality games. So check this out.

AI will unlock the next phase of this development for world builders. We're already developing genes like this here. The creator has asked AI to model a generator, animated, to shake and paint it yellow over rusted metal. All of it just by typing what she wants to make in the creator tool. AI tools will help streamline things like layout, texturing, scripting, sound effects creation.

So that was probably my favorite part of the developer keynote, right? I love the AI stuff. I love stuff that makes it easier for normal people who don't know how to code virtual reality worlds to actually build stuff in these virtual reality worlds. Like, I can see myself maybe building a sort of mocked up world with cool items throughout that world using these AI tools. Like, it's going to get to a point where I can create that environment myself with AI. And that's what's really exciting to me. They showed off some other features like being able to customize your avatars in horizon worlds more. And once again, a lot of it is going to be using AI. So if you want to create a character, you can now actually describe it with AI.

And later in 2025, users will be able to generate a completely new avatar by using our AI powered editor, by just describing what they want. And we know you will want to also control the capabilities and the types of avatars that show up in your world. So this is going to be a great way for avatars to be able to adjust an environment just as the user is jumping into your world.

So that is also super cool. And pretty much everything that they're building over at Meta, specifically related to AI, they're trying to build as open source so that others can grab it, iterate off of it, build off of it, make it better, and find really, really cool and powerful use cases for it. Now they did get into a lot more like technical stuff and in the weeds. That's sort of over my head because I'm not personally much of a developer, but those were my big takeaways from Meta Connect event. I was honestly pretty blown away by what they showed off. And again, this isn't sponsored. They didn't pay me to talk about this. But I am really kind of a fan of what Meta's been doing lately. I really like their sort of AI character creator in Instagram that Don Allen showed off. I really like what they're doing with the Meta glasses with the translation and the memory and that sort of stuff. I cannot wait to get my hands on Project Orion. That is going to be so mind blowing, especially if they can figure out how to get it into a form factor like they did with their Meta sunglasses. If they can keep on shrinking down that technology more and more, where you're just walking around looking like you're wearing a pair of Ray Ban aviators, that's going to be crazy. So that's what I got for you today. That was my breakdown of what they talked about at Meta Connect. There was some other little things throughout there, but that's pretty much the overview of all the stuff that I thought was the coolest things about this event. Again, super excited. I was actually really blown away, especially by the Orion pair of glasses. Such a fun event. I got to meet all sorts of creators that I've been chatting with online for a long time, but got to finally meet them in person. I got to meet Cleo Abram briefly. I got to hang out with Roberto Nixon and Kane Calloway and Rowan Chung again and Don Allen Stevenson again. Riley Brown is here. I met him for the first time at this event in person. Linus Ekinstam I met him here actually the second time I've met him, but he's here at this event hanging out as well. So many amazing creators in the tech and AI world that I got to actually spend some time with and hang out with and learn some of their strategies for growing on Instagram and YouTube and places like that. Daniel Mack, the car guy, is here. I got to have dinner with him last night. It's just been an amazing experience and I can't thank Meta enough for inviting me out to Meta Connect to experience this, because this is the type of stuff that I live for. Like, I absolutely love seeing this new technology and getting the chance to demo it and put my hands on it and put it through its motions and see what it's all capable of. It has just been a blast and I hope that came through in this video. I hope this gave you a good glimpse into what Meta has been working on. I know the stuff I talk about and what I showed off from Meta Connect here isn't for everybody. I know there's a lot of people that aren't fans of Meta and Zuckerberg. I get it. I love the tech. Put the figureheads behind us. Ignore the fact that it's, you know, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and that kind of stuff and just look at the cool tech that they're putting out and how making it part of the meta ecosystem inside of Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook and all of these tools that people are already using anyway is really going to make this stuff explode and really, really improve adoption. And so many more people are going to be using these types of tools because they're worked into Meta now. And that is really exciting to me. I want to see more people using it. I want to see more use cases. I want to see more interesting and exciting ways that people are putting this technology to use so that I can turn around and say, look how this person's using it. It is really cool. It improved their life in this way. It improved their workflow in this way. It helped them increase their income in this way. It helped them increase, increase their creativity in this way. I just love this stuff. It's so exciting and I am so pumped to be here and to talk about this stuff and to be able to share what I'm learning with you. So hopefully that came across and hopefully you learned a little bit about what Meta is up to from Meta Connect. And thank you so much for tuning in. Check out FutureTools IO. If you haven't already there's a cool newsletter there and a bunch of cool AI tools to find, and I keep the news up to date there. It has been a crazy exciting week in the world of AI. My AI news video on Friday is probably going to be pretty hefty, but I've been making smaller news videos this week so that maybe I can shrink down the end of the week video a little bit. But that's what I got for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really, really appreciate you watching this channel. You're the reason I get to come to places like this and nerd out and turn around and show you the nerdery that I get to see and hopefully bring you into this experience with me. So thank you so much for tuning in. I really, really appreciate you. I will see you in the next video. Bye Bye.