Meta Announces New Virtual Event to Share How it’s Using AI to Build for the Metaverse Shift

Looking to get your head around the metaverse concept, and what it could mean for the future of digital connection?

This could help – later this month, Meta is hosting a virtual event where various internal experts will discuss their approaches to utilizing AI in building the metaverse, and what role machine learning systems will play in the process.

The speakers, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will explore the varying applications of the metaverse, and what it will take to get there.

As explained by Meta:

“Building for the metaverse is the most ambitious long-term bet we’ve ever made as a company. The experiences we’re envisioning will require massive technological progress over the coming years, and our continued advancements in AI will be core to our success. The breakthroughs we’re making now in AI are happening thanks to the long-term bets we made in the early days of our research, in areas like computer vision, speech and translation, and our developer community.”

Meta will explore each of these elements specifically in this virtual event, with sessions including ‘Delivering Inclusive Technologies Through Translations’, ‘Building Responsible AI at Meta’ and ‘The Path to Human Level Intelligence’.

That last one will no doubt freak out folk like Elon Musk, who has repeatedly warned of the potential dangers of AI advancement.

But whether you like it or not, this research is in progress, and Meta’s looking to build this into the broader metaverse scope, in order to facilitate the next level of digital connection.

Though it is interesting, once again, to note how Meta is looking to take ownership of broader tech conversations and development by placing them all under the ‘metaverse’ banner. By re-naming the company in line with this, and re-aligning every new advance as a metaverse addition, the company’s seeking to stake its claim to the next stage of connection, by making Meta synonymous with any such advances.

Is AI really a key part of the metaverse? Well, that depends – what even is the metaverse, exactly? Because it’s as yet undefined, Meta can attach anything that it likes into the project, and then position itself as the leading platform for the space, and each development, by being ‘Meta’, the originator of the term.

It reminds me of how regulators in some regions told Meta – then Facebook – that it needed to shut down its Free Basics internet access program, because many people who had signed up to the initiative, who hadn’t had access to the internet in the past, had eventually come to see Facebook as the internet. They didn’t differentiate between web access and the Facebook platform, which gave the company a significant market advantage by skewing perceptions of what exactly the web can be, and controlling access to this audience.

It seems to now be doing the same on a much larger scale, by making everything about the metaverse, which, for all intents and purposes, Meta itself will own. You want to connect in VR, you’ll do that in Meta’s metaverse, you want to build new AR experiences, they’ll need to be aligned with the metaverse shift, under Meta management. In this sense, Meta’s corporate name change serves a far broader purpose than simply re-aligning the company’s focus, or potentially distancing itself from the controversies of the past.

So how will AI play into this? You can tune into this virtual event on February 23rd for more insight, direct from Meta’s AI leadership team.

You can sign up to get reminders for the event here.