[hungrigekatze]

This video is incredibly long, dull, and lacking in any technical depth (as new product releases often are) but I watched Zuckerberg's keynote speech - the 45 minute-long one - and the engineering guy's speech in which he talks about LLMs because I work in the language models space and was hoping to hear more news about open-source LLMs and Llama2, Llama3, etc.: https://m.facebook.com/MetaforDevelopers/videos/meta-connect... (I wish that video were on a seek-able platform with a searchable transcript like YouTube.)

In any case, the digital avatars of famous people were introduced in Zuckerberg's keynote speech, along with the absurd RayBans+Snapchat camera sunglasses that now record and transmit audio (great...), as well as the third generation of their AR/VR headset. (It seems they're leaning heavily into the _augmented_ reality instead of a virtual world in the 'metaverse'.) Oh, speaking of the AR/VR headset: Xbox games are coming to it in December 2023. I didn't expect that: Microsoft and Meta joining up on an AR/VR headset.

As someone who works in tech in the United States, but who had previously lived in a country in the EU that is more privacy minded than a lot of other EU countries and is decidedly more privacy-oriented than the United States, I must say that the RayBan + Snapchat video and audio sunglasses thoroughly creeped me out.

This article touches upon but a few of the reasons why I do like those devices: https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Wie-Facebook... Yes, there's an application for hands-on learning with AR/VR goggles and it makes it easier to connect with one's friends and family on the other side of the world, but I don't want to exist in a society where everyone is wearing a potential surveillance apparatus on their face and where people interact with but a digital simulacrum of the real world.

I'm terribly curious as to if anyone has done market (or academic) research into these notions of 'digital avatars' of not-famous people since LLMs have grown in ability? I'd read some of the literature on the perceived helpfulness or utility in question-answering via digital avatars some years ago, but that was probably a decade or more. Can anyone recommend any recent research in the space? I'd also truly love to read any marketing-focused materials on this flavor of tech product as I'm just not convinced that there's a real market there for digital avatars / digital 'holograms' of real (live or dead) humans.