It was remarkable that the metaworker had to ask. It’s been less than two years since Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of the company he founded as Facebook to Meta, betting his future on an immersive digital realm called the Metaverse.
Now, Meta’s CEO is trying to: As an arms race over burgeoning technology takes over Silicon Valley, the social media giant is expected to be a full-fledged player in artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Google, and a string of startups are pushing chatbots and other flashy innovations with generative artificial intelligence, a type of technology that can generate original, human-like content, but Meta is trying to catch up. seems to be
Two generative AI projects, including Galatica, a large-scale language model for synthesizing scientific research, and BlenderBot 3, a multi-purpose chatbot, gained notoriety when their models spewed out inaccurate and hateful rhetoric. it was done. The company quickly paused public demos of Galatica while BlenderBot failed to garner significant attention. Since then, the company has promoted more mundane innovations, such as advertising tools.
After nearly a year of dismal financial performance, Zuckerberg endorsed artificial intelligence as the engine of Meta’s revenue growth.
“Our AI efforts are delivering positive results across our apps and business,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings statement last month.
Meta’s CEO has strongly denied the renewed attention to AI signals that the company isn’t so committed to a bigger bet on the Metaverse. In fact, Zuckerberg argues that AI is the cornerstone of the Metaverse and will be a key tool for creating more dynamic and accessible virtual reality experiences. For example, less tech-savvy users can use generative AI to create their own new worlds in Meta’s virtual reality-powered apps.
But Wall Street and employees alike will be watching how Mr. Zuckerberg prioritizes investments in both technologies as he strengthens the company’s financial performance and employee morale.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said: “Meta has gone to great lengths to outline its strategy, how it will monetize it, and show that it is also a major AI player. It’s important to do,” he said. They need to prove that “Microsoft, Google and Apple aren’t sitting at the table of adults and sitting at the table of children.”
As a series of news stories and analysts speculate that the Metaverse is dead and that Zuckerberg is pulling out of his multibillion-dollar investment, AI rhetoric has put some employees and investors at risk. are confused about the company’s core focus.
Some employees have expressed frustration at the company’s mixed trajectory in favor of AI while cutting jobs and other projects, according to three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity about the internal affairs. . Other employees are scrambling to receive internal alerts about AI-related jobs, one of the people said, a way to safely position themselves for the company’s next big bet.
The company announced Thursday that it is launching an AI sandbox that will allow marketers to use AI to create more text and visual options for their ads. Meta executives say the product helps marketers target their ads more effectively to different types of consumers by making very subtle changes to copy, photos and backgrounds. Stated.
For example, if your company’s logo is on a blurry cityscape instead of a pile of snow, your ad is likely to grab the attention of women under the age of 35. Meta also announced Meta Lattice, a new artificial intelligence-driven model for improving the performance of advertising on the network.
But these products are much more modest than those that competitors have endorsed in recent months. On Wednesday, Google responded directly to some search queries by extracting from sources on the web and generating its own results, rather than linking and summarizing them from other websites as it has done for 20 years. Announced to start answering.
This strategic shift has the potential to change the way users experience the Internet, as well as the publishers and content creators who rely on Google for their traffic. Google’s announcement came after pressure from investors pushing the company to catch up with Microsoft, which had already integrated ChatGPT into its search engine Bing.
Meta appears to be taking a more cautious path.
The company announced in February that it was forming a new product group to “accelerate” the use of generative AI. The group, led by former Apple executive Ahmed Aldar, aims to bring together key teams from research groups and consumer-focused groups to develop new products, the company said. Zuckerberg said he hopes to not only build AI-powered generative chat experiences on WhatsApp and Messenger, but also innovations in business messaging and customer support.
On the research side, Mehta has been involved in the field of artificial intelligence for many years. The company’s laboratories stand out in the industry by publishing a large amount of research. Research projects include technologies that use AI to animate children’s drawings, decipher speech from images of brain activity, and enable real-time translation of most languages.
Some believe that Meta’s renewed focus on AI could help it overcome threats to its ad-based business model. Increasing competition in the social media market from start-ups such as TikTok and Apple’s new privacy rules are hitting the digital advertising market.
Zuckerberg credited AI with making people spend more time on Instagram last month as the company promoted a short social video called Reels. And during an earnings call, he told investors that artificial intelligence is helping how the company recommends content to users, serves ads to consumers, and roots out rule-breaking and offensive content. He reminded me that it was a system that he had “worked on for many years.”
But in recent weeks, Meta executives have tried to push back against claims that investment strategy has changed dramatically.
Zuckerberg said last month, “There are rumors circulating that we are somehow moving away from a focus on the Metaverse vision, and I want to be frank with you that that is not accurate.” . “We have been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for many years, and we will continue to focus on both.”
