Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, recently discussed the company’s broad plans for artificial intelligence in 2023, although he couldn’t help but mix in metaverse initiatives despite not being asked. According to Zuckerberg, Meta will be launching multiple generative AI products this year, but they need to tackle an efficiency problem first.
“I’d say the two biggest themes [we’ll ] focus on for this year is efficiency… and then [releasing] generative AI work.”
Mark Zuckerberg
He further stated that Facebook has several work streams across its products, utilizing large language and diffusion models to generate images, videos, avatars, 3D assets, and more. Meta’s aim is to empower creators to have better creative access and be more productive across the company’s apps.
Meta’s Generative AI Plans for 2023
Zuckerberg mentioned that while the company is working on this exciting area, they want to be careful not to get too far ahead in R&D. He added, “I think you’ll see us launch a number of different things this year.”
And unless you don’t pay attention to the news, you probably wouldn’t miss it since they’ll be sharing updates on the progress of these rather vague products. As of press time, there isn’t much to know in terms of how Meta’s generative AI products will function.
While ChatGPT currently commands the most attention in the AI world, Meta’s counterpart model Galactica AI, which was released 15 days prior, was a far cry in terms of quality and accuracy. Meta had to shut it down due to too many complaints of bias and inaccuracies. As a practical research tool, Galactica failed to do its main purpose, which is a stark contrast to OpenAI’s chatbot, which garnered a million users in mere five days.
Still, it’s not a far-fetched notion that Galactica might be slated for a relaunch this year, hopefully with better outputs.
Text-to-image generation tools like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney are second in line among the fastest-growing subsectors in AI. Considering the proliferation of images and videos on Meta, the first (first successful, that is) generative AI to be launched by the company this year will likely be a diffusion model for generating images based on text prompts.
One of the biggest challenges the company will face is making the technology more efficient so that it can scale effectively.
A lot of the stuff is expensive… to generate an image, video, or, chat interaction. You know, these things we’re talking about a cent or fraction of a cent.
Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg also expects the space to move quickly, with a lot of learning and trial and error (perhaps for Meta, especially). Despite his bullish words on generative AI, it’s hard not to notice that Meta’s primary focus right now is the metaverse, a virtual world project that very few people seem to be interested in at present.
Other Plans for the Year
The company is also working on improving its discovery engine for Facebook and Instagram through AI, with a focus on short-form videos called Reels. In the past six months, monetization efficiency on Facebook has doubled and Zucks expects to be roughly neutral by the end of this year or early next year.
In the broader ads business, they have seen over 20% more conversions and higher returns on ad spending. Whatsapp is intended to bring messaging as the next pillar of Meta’s business with click-to-message ads and paid messaging.
In terms of the metaverse, Meta has already shipped Quest Pro, the first mainstream mixed reality device, and they plan to launch a next-generation consumer headset later this year. The metaverse ecosystem is growing, with over 200 apps on Meta’s devices that have made more than a million in revenue.
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