Meta Connect 24 - New AI + AR Glasses

4 minute read

More topics: Visa and Mastercard invest billions in cybersecurity AI, and Google DeepMind unveils AlphaChip

Magic AI News

Hi AI Enthusiasts,

Welcome to this week’s Magic AI News, where we present you the most exciting AI news of the week. Today, we are talking about AI in finance and Meta’s new product announcements at Meta Connect.

This week’s Magic AI tool is our favorite tool for learning languages. With this tool, you can learn foreign languages by speaking to an AI. Stay curious! 😎

Let’s explore this week’s AI news together. 👇🏽


Top AI news of the week

🏦 Visa and Mastercard invest billions in cybersecurity AI

Mastercard has announced the acquisition of Recorded Future (approximately $2.65 billion), and Visa has announced the acquisition of Featurespace. Both companies use artificial intelligence to detect bank fraud.

Visa and Mastercard aim to use these acquisitions to protect their services from the growing number of cyber-attacks. It is a very important topic. For this reason, we have written an article about detecting credit card fraud. In our article, you will learn how to use an autoencoder in Python to detect credit card fraud.

Our thoughts

Fraud attempts, cybercrime, and ransomware attacks are becoming more common. It’s good to see Mastercard and Visa protecting themselves with these new acquisitions. Current AI technology is playing an increasingly important role in cybersecurity in the financial sector.

More information

👓 Meta Connect 24: New AI + AR Glasses

Meta Connect was on September 25 and 26, where Meta announced several new products.

The details:

  • Presentation of the Quest 3S for the mass market (128 GB and 256 GB) with support for Meta AI (Meta AI is not available in the EU for now!)
  • Introduction of Llama 3.2: The first vision model that can understand both images and text. It comes with 11B and 90B parameters.
  • Two new small Llama models (1B and 3B parameters) for mobile devices, and also for glasses.
  • New Ray-Ban Glasses with AI features, i.e. real time translation (English, French, Italian, and Spanish)
  • Meta also introduced the AR glasses, Orion. The glasses weigh less than 100g and have a wide field of view and advanced features like voice control and hand tracking. According to Meta, the development took over ten years.
Meta Orion AR glasses (Image by Meta)
Meta Orion AR glasses (Image by Meta)

Our thoughts

Meta presented a lot, but there was nothing really new. The Meta Orion glasses are still a prototype and are not yet available for sale. Meta has distributed the glasses to employees and selected partners for testing and software development.

To sell the glasses, Meta needs an AppStore similar to Apple. In our opinion, Apple is much further ahead with AR glasses. Apple has an operating system with an AppStore for the glasses. Meta still lacks these essential components.

More information

👩🏽‍💻 Google DeepMind unveils AlphaChip

Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaChip, an AI system that designs computer chips using reinforcement learning. According to DeepMind, it can create chip layouts in hours instead of months.

The details:

  • The method has been used in the last three generations of Google’s custom AI accelerator, the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), to design chip layouts that surpass human capabilities. TPUs are the heart of Google’s powerful generative AI systems.
  • AlphaChip, based on a novel “edge-based” graph neural network, learns the relationships between interconnected chip components and generalizes across chips.
  • The system improves with each layout it designs.

Our thoughts

AlphaChip accelerates the development of chip design enormously. It also solves a real-world engineering problem, which will have a big impact on the performance of new AI models. Better models and better chips lead to better and better models!

More information


Hand-picked AI tool list


Magic AI tool of the week

The popular language learning app Duolingo now also offers video calls with an AI avatar. So, you can talk with an AI avatar in real time. Duolingo uses the current GPT-4o model from OpenAI for this functionality.

Take a look at the following demo video 👇🏽

AI is increasingly making its way into the education sector and creating real added value. We use the Duolingo app every day to improve our English skills. The new AI feature is available as a paid subscription.

👉🏽 Learn more on the website of Duolingo.


Articles of the week


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Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

- Tinz Twins

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