Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, told investors that the company sees “an excellent opportunity to introduce AI agents in a way that is useful and meaningful to billions” of people.
Zuckerberg, who was vague on how Meta would add generative AI into its apps, gave the most detailed glimpse yet at the company’s earnings conference call for the first three months of this year. The company announced 28.6 billion dollars in revenue, and 2 billion users daily of the Facebook App, beating Wall Street estimates. Meta’s quarterly profit was $5.7 billion. This is a decrease of 24 percent from last year.
Zuckerberg stated on the earnings conference call that “We are exploring chat experiences for WhatsApp and Messenger, creating visuals to post in Facebook, Instagram, and Ads, and in time, video and multi-modal experience as well.” I expect these tools to be useful for everyone, from creators to regular people. Once we have mastered this experience, I anticipate that AI agents will be of great interest for customer service and business messaging. This will eventually extend to the work we do on the metaverse where people will be able create avatars and objects, as well as worlds with code that ties them all together.
We are not behind in developing our AI infrastructure
Meta initially delayed building the infrastructure needed to support this kind of AI feature. This led it to spend millions of dollars in recent quarters on rehauling their data centers. Zuckerberg announced today that “we’re no longer behind when it comes to building our AI infrastructure.” He also teased the release of generative AI products in the next few months.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been a huge success, has made generative artificial intelligence the trend of today . Google, Meta and smaller companies like Snap are now competing to create similar applications. Meta has released a AI model for researchers called LLaMA earlier this year. However, it still hasn’t launched anything that’s similar to ChatGPT.
This is not the case anymore. Zuckerberg stated today that generative AI will “literally touch every single product” of his company and hinted how it could speed up WhatsApp’s fledgling customer support business. He said that once you enable tens or millions of AI agents to act on behalf of businesses, they will be able to afford people engaging in chat.
Zuckerberg said that while Meta is pivoting towards AI, like the rest, it’s not giving up the metaverse. Zuckerberg said that the “narrative” that Meta was moving away from metaverse is “not true,” as shown by the upcoming launch of the Quest VR headset. Meta’s Reality Labs reported a $4 billion net loss for the last quarter. The company expects its “operational losses” to rise year-over-year in 2023.
