Tag: Meta

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Kissed by the Muse?

According to the article “Tamagotchi trifft KI-Agent” (“Tamagotchi Meets AI Agent”) (Heise, September 24, 2026), Meta has unveiled Muse Charm, a small wearable device designed to serve as a home for its new personal AI agent, Muse. The gadget, which is reminiscent of a Tamagotchi, can similarly be attached to a keychain or carried in a pocket. It features a screen displaying Jolly, Muse’s avatar. As Heise reports, the assistant is activated via a fingerprint sensor, while cameras are intended to allow it to perceive the user’s surroundings. The device is also expected to feature a microphone, two cameras, and 5G connectivity, although the company has yet to release full technical specifications. Mark Zuckerberg said at Meta Connect that Muse Charm is not yet fully finished and that only a small number of units have been produced so far. Nevertheless, according to Heise, Meta plans to launch the device in time for the December holiday shopping season. Pricing and regional availability have yet to be announced. With Muse Charm, Meta is entering the still-emerging field of physical AI, where products such as Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit’s R1 have so far failed to achieve lasting success. It remains to be seen whether the company has truly been kissed by the Muse.

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A Universal Translator Comes

The idea of a Babel Fish comes from the legendary novel or series of novels “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Douglas Adams alluded to the Tower of Babel. In 1997, Yahoo launched a web service for the automatic translation of texts under this name. Various attempts to implement the Babel Fish in hardware and software followed. Meta’s SeamlessM4T software can handle almost a hundred languages. In a blog post, the American company refers to the work of Douglas Adams. “M4T” stands for “Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation”. Again, it is a language model that makes spectacular things possible. It has been trained on four million hours of raw audio. A demo is available at seamless.metademolab.com/demo. The first step is to record a sentence. The sentence is displayed as text. Then select the language you want to translate into, for example Japanese. The sentence is displayed again in text form and, if desired, in spoken language. A synthetic voice is used. You can also use your own voice, but this is not yet integrated into the application. A paper by Meta AI and UC Berkeley can be downloaded here.

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A New Language AI

“Meta’s AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI’s pioneering neural network GPT-3. And in an unprecedented move for Big Tech, it is giving it away to researchers – together with details about how it was built and trained.” (MIT Technology Review, May 3, 2022) This was reported by MIT Technology Review on May 3, 2022. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to generate natural language. Not only web-based systems, but also voice assistants and social robots can be equipped with it. Amazing texts emerge, and long meaningful conversations are possible – almost like between two real people. “Meta’s move is the first time that a fully trained large language model will be made available to any researcher who wants to study it. The news has been welcomed by many concerned about the way this powerful technology is being built by small teams behind closed doors.” (MIT Technology Review, May 3, 2022)