What happened? Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will not be left behind when it comes to artificial intelligence. The CEO said his company is building a new top-level product group that will focus on implementing generative AI in its services, enabling “delightful experiences” for users.
Zuckerberg wrote that creating the AI team will involve bringing together other teams working on generative AI from across the company. The Meta boss says it will turbocharge work in this area.
The first step is to create creative and expressive tools, with the long-term goal being to create “AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways.” Zuckerberg says the company is exploring the use of generative AI in text, such as chat on Messenger and WhatsApp. This might involve implementing something similar to ChatGPT that helps people create messages.
Meta’s AI can also be used for images such as Instagram filters and ad formats, as well as “video and multi-modal experiences.”
Axios writes that the team will be led by VP Ahmad Al-Dahle, who spent 16 years at Apple before joining Meta in April 2020.
Meta last week released a new natural language model, LLaMA, which reportedly outperforms GPT-3 in most benchmarks and is only one-tenth the size of GPT-3 overall.
The explosion of ChatGPT and other generative AIs in recent months has seen companies falling over each other to implement them in their products, including Bing and Microsoft’s Edge browsers. It also led to the launch of hundreds of startups based around technology.
While Meta is now embracing generative AI, one has to wonder if its focus will shift away from the company’s metaverse plans. Zuckerberg’s conviction that the technology will be as revolutionary as the internet led Facebook to change its corporate name to Meta in 2021. An executive recently said that the metaverse will eventually become just as important. on smartphones.
But Meta’s Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse, has lost tens of billions of dollars in the past two years. Zuckerberg insists the investment will pay off in the long term, earning hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars over time.
Few people outside of Meta share Zuck’s enthusiasm for an all-encompassing VR/AR platform. With so many tech giants now hailing AI as the next big thing, could getting all involved in the metaverse turn out to be a costly mistake for Meta? Zuckerberg thinks we won’t know until around 2030, by which time everyone will have some form of AI integration, perhaps.