Meta has spent billions to stay competitive with artificial intelligence, but the tech giant faces growing pushback as CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to announce new products built for the AI era on Wednesday.
The company will kick off its annual Connect conference from its Menlo Park headquarters at 4:00 pm PT (2300 GMT) Wednesday, and Zuckerberg will deliver a keynote address to the developer-focused event.
Earlier this month the social media giant launched Muse, its first agentic app for consumers which is designed to perform tasks on behalf of humans, like a digital personal assistant.
After a user connects various personal accounts — whether financial, health-related or shopping — they can ask Meta to perform tasks like signing up for services, booking appointments and making calls.
Amazon blocked Meta this week from using AI bots to shop for users automatically, while other businesses including Instacart, Shopify and Expedia have announced partnerships to integrate their services into Muse.
The Muse agent is built on Meta’s own AI models and is designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
The company had its first pair of interactive smart glasses in 2021, about a year before OpenAI sparked a global AI frenzy with its release of ChatGPT, and since then the devices have become more and more advanced.
