Meta will unveil its next-generation AI model, Llama 3, later this year, which will be included in the virtual assistant of the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, allowing the assistant to handle more complex tasks and respond more naturally.

Llama 3 is an open source model and will also come in smaller sizes that can be installed on local hardware such as cell phones and smart glasses; it is expected to be as good as or better than OpenAI's GPT-4.

At an event held at Meta's headquarters in London, a panel of executives dropped a few hints about what we might see from Meta in terms of AI, including Llama 3, the MetaAI assistant, and of course the glasses.

Last year, the MetaAI assistant with Llama-2 was upgraded to "see" through the glasses' camera. This allows it to give advice on clothing and technical advice, something that will be even more impressive in Llama 3.

Llama 3 is a large language model that can range in size from very small, such as competing with Claude Haiku and Gemini Nano, to large, such as GPT-4 and Claude Opus, with full response and reasoning.

A third version of the meta model is more fully multimodal and is expected to be able to understand a variety of inputs, including spatial understanding of the real world, speech, and video.

In combination, this improved immersive understanding will give a better perspective on the real world and allow Meta to enhance the MetaAI assistant in Rayban's smart glasses.

Joelle Pineau, Meta's vice president of AI research, said at the London event: "We didn't set out to create an assistant for glasses. We set out to build an interactive AI model that could understand physical space and interactivity in the real world.

Meta's outspoken Chief AI Scientist, Jan Lukun, wore Ray-Ban glasses during the panel and declared that they were now his main pair of glasses. He said, "In the near future, every one of our interactions with the digital world will be through AI assistants. Our entire digital diet will be mediated by AI systems."

Meta does more than answer a few questions and take pictures on command with its spectacled assistant; MetaAI's ambitions extend to other apps and products, including the Quest 3 VR headset.

A panel at the London event revealed that future versions of MetaAI will find their way to Instagram and WhatsApp as Facebook's mechanism to help manage even larger groups.

The assistant is built on the open source Llama 2, but will move to Llama 3 when the next generation model is ready for release. Larger training data sets will improve inference and provide deeper understanding.

"MetaAI will be a general assistant that can take in information and provide the support the user desires. It will soon be available in Quest 3," Pineau explained. She added that this will be along with other products like WhatsApp.

She said the goal is to "make Meta AI with Rama the most useful assistant in the world."

Having tried Meta Ray-Ban glasses for the first time, I will seriously consider getting a pair instead of the usual boring frames when my prescription changes.