Everything announced at Meta Connect 2024

Meta has cut deals for high-profile actors to lend their voices to its Meta AI chatbot, with Kristen Bell among the initial set of voices. Bell lending her voice is a bit of a surprise. Back in June, she openly expressed opposition to Meta’s AI using her data.

She reposted a popular Instagram message declaring that she refused to consent to Meta using her content and likeness for training large language models and demanding that Instagram “get rid of the AI program.”

Meta is overhauling its metaverse avatars, and you’ll be able to use them soon: the new look will be available on October 1st, the company announced at its Connect conference on Wednesday. The new avatars will be available on Meta Horizon OS (its VR operating system), as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

Meta’s avatars started out in a rough place, but the company has made steady improvements, and these changes look to build on that. With the upgraded avatars, Meta is going to give users new ways to fine-tune things like eye size, nose shape, and body shapes, Meta’s Aigerim Shorman, a VP on the Horizon team, said onstage. That’s thanks in part to a new underlying tech stack, which includes an updated avatar skeleton.

Meta’s Quest headsets and app store have been around for a while, but with a software experience largely limited to 3D and AR apps and games. But now, the company says it’s opening things up — Horizon OS and Quest VP Mark Rabkin said during Meta Connect that from today, the Meta app store “fully welcomes 2D and spatial apps.”

Meta also says it supports web apps, and what do you know? The New York Times’ Wordle app for Quest headsets, which we wrote about last week, is a Progressive Web App.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing back on the idea that social media directly harms teen mental health. During an interview with The Verge’s Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said that “the majority of the high-quality research out there suggests that there’s no causal connection at a broad scale between these things.”

This echoes the statement Zuckerberg gave in front of Congress in January during a hearing about child safety, where he argued that existing research hasn’t shown a causal link between social media and poor teen mental health. As my colleague Adi Robertson pointed out at the time, it’s difficult to prove causal links, and research shows social media could cause both negative and positive impacts on an adolescent’s mental health.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. In an interview with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said Meta will likely strike “certain partnerships” for useful content. But if others demand payment, then — as it’s done with news outlets — the company would prefer to walk away.

“I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” Zuckerberg said in the interview, which coincides with Meta’s annual Connect event. “My guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable.” But if creators are concerned or object, “when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much.”

Meta has big ambitions for using AI to help creators, and it showed two impressive demos of what that could look like onstage at Connect today.

One version of this involves fully recreating real influencers as AI figures. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a live demo of a creator-based AI persona, which looked like the creator, talked like the creator, and tried to respond to questions like the creator would. It was pretty wild to watch.

We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Mark Zuckerberg on the show for Meta Connect. 

There’s a lot to talk about this year: on Wednesday, the company announced new developments in VR, AI, and the fast-growing world of consumer smart glasses, including a new pair of AR glasses the company is calling Orion. Before we start, Alex and I talked a little about the Orion demo he experienced at Meta’s headquarters, some of the context around the company’s big AR efforts of late, and how Mark is approaching his reputation as a leader and the public perception of Meta as a whole.

They look almost like a normal pair of glasses. 

That’s the first thing I notice as I walk into a conference room at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The black Clark Kent-esque frames sitting on the table in front of me look unassuming, but they represent CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the computers that come after smartphones.