At Metaverse Event, Meta’s Zuckerberg Unveils Work to Improve How Humans Chat to AI

Small toy figures are seen in front of displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration taken, October 28, 2021. (Reuters)
Small toy figures are seen in front of displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration taken, October 28, 2021. (Reuters)
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At Metaverse Event, Meta’s Zuckerberg Unveils Work to Improve How Humans Chat to AI

Small toy figures are seen in front of displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration taken, October 28, 2021. (Reuters)
Small toy figures are seen in front of displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration taken, October 28, 2021. (Reuters)

Facebook-owner Meta is working on AI research to allow people to have more natural conversations with voice assistants, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, a step towards how people will communicate with AI in the metaverse.

The company's Project CAIRaoke is "a fully end-to-end neural model for building on-device assistants," said Zuckerberg, speaking at Meta's live-streamed artificial intelligence event.

Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse, a futuristic idea of virtual environments where users can work, socialize and play, will be the successor to the mobile internet.

The social media company, which recently lost a third of its market value after a dismal earnings report, has invested heavily in its new focus on building the metaverse and changed its name to reflect this ambition. This month Meta reported a 2021 net loss of $10.2 billion from its Reality Labs, the company's augmented and virtual reality business.

Meta also recently announced its research team has built a new artificial intelligence supercomputer that it thinks will be the fastest in the world when completed in mid-2022.



Meta's Instagram Down for Thousands of Users in US, Downdetector Shows

Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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Meta's Instagram Down for Thousands of Users in US, Downdetector Shows

Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Meta Platforms's Instagram was down for thousands of users in the US on Wednesday morning, according outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

There were more than 6,549 incidents of people reporting issues with the platform as of 9:16 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.

Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last year, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms faced disruptions on several occasions, including a global outage in March.

Downdetector's numbers are based on user-submitted reports. The actual number of affected users may vary.