Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently told investors that the technology company sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful.”
Although Zuckerberg didn’t follow up on exactly how the company plans on adding generative AI to its apps, his interest in the project was shown during the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of this year. It was reported that Meta earned $28.6 billion USD (roughly $38.9 billion CAD) in revenue along with a record 2 billion daily users of the Facebook app. Meta’s first quarter profits totalled $5.7 billion USD (about $7.7 billion CAD).
The CEO did tease potential plans for AI implementation on apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger and visual creation tools for posts on Facebook and Instagram, saying, “I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience.”
Not one to shy away from bringing the topic back to the heavily-touted metaverse, Zuckerberg would go on to state that, over time, AI would come to the virtual world in the form of created avatars, objects, and worlds.
Initially behind on the AI push, Meta has slowly been taking steps towards bringing artificial intelligence to its systems, including spending billions of dollars on rehauling its data centers in recent quarters. Zuckerberg now says that the company is “no longer behind” in building its AI infrastructure and is planning on releasing related products in the coming months.
The news comes as AI chatbots have become all the rage lately, with companies like Snapchat and Google joining in on the craze. While Meta did release an AI language model called LLaMA to researchers earlier this year, it has not released anything widely accessible as of yet.
However, with Zuckerberg announcing that AI is “literally going to touch every single one of our products,” it won’t be long before Meta attempts a splash in the AI field. This doesn’t mean that the company is shifting away from the metaverse, though, with the next Quest VR headset slated to debut later this year.
Speaking of Meta’s journey into AR, Meta Spark is currently looking to support Indigenous storytelling through augmented reality.
Image credit: Meta
Via: The Verge
