- Mark Zuckerberg stunningly has become "far more crazy" about the possible application of AI in the Meta world.
- AI will be his main goal now, and he would set aside around $40 billion for a year, most of which will go to AI investments.
- Zuckerberg has clearly identified 3 keys that will become a game-changer for Meta in the next couple of years through the process of AI adoption.
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| Photo: Julio Lopez/Pexels |
Mark Zuckerberg now believes that Meta is the world leader in AI not only because he knows how the technology will be one of the major sources of profit in the next years, but also because he understands what are the particular features that distinguish it from the other companies.
After intefacing with Llama 3, Facebook’s new AI model, Zuckerberg turned out to be "more headstrong and progressive" and became sure about the company’s chances to make tech a reality.
He kept the analysts informed during the Wednesday conference call that the future strategy of his company will be focused on "significantly scaling the investment into the next generations of models and the largest AI services on a global scale."
"Using the latest AI models to go beyond a simple AI can form good social and commerce products"- the CEO added. "I would say that not only have we demonstrated the ability to create dominating models that put us in the position of leading AI company but, yet, we have many opportunities open up not only to the most obvious ones but the many others as well."
Heavy spending again
Thus one has to come up with a strategy which is not all-suggesting. Meta announced the update to its capital expenditure guidance for 2023 and revealed its expectations to range from $35 billion to $40 billion, primarily dedicated to various types of AI investments. Shares in the Company tanked 16% in after-hours trading.
Meta’s experimentation with a gigantic VR project had a wild amount of spending which made investors unreasonable last time Zuckerberg was enthusiastic. The stock lost its footing and did not recover until the manning process started immediately. This was the time of the "Year of Efficiency" characterized by considerable layoffs and a new business-minded CEO.
Wednesday was effectively the day Zuckerberg had to stop the market panic about his now obsessed AI neighbour not being a businessman which could be a potential caveat in this idea.
He highlights "several ways" generative AI can help make money for Meta, giving an example where the company can take the top using the generated content as the way to build a massively gigantic business. The time to get there though is still off at some point in distant future and he warned.
Business messaging
Recitation of sizable commercial "business messaging" is another way AI makes money. Companies reach out to Meta for commercial support such as artificial intelligence tools e.g., bots to support conversation between merchants and their consumers. According Zuckerberg, his AI will break the boundary of just a chatbot and become the AI agent , solving more complicated problems, and being able to deal with it. This AI can understand units, process multiple queries and solve user problems instead of just finding out simple facts.
The immediate business opportunities provided by AI business messaging are "one of the two closest-to-hand developments according to Zuckerberg. He highlighted a fact that is, most probably, it won't be accomplished within a year, but it approximates like five years to go. The nearest aim in this respect is to "reach a wide mass of people, to use Meta AI as a principal part of their work routine," as he explained.
Digital ads in "AI conversions"
Meta can also use generative AI as another tactic of making money by "presenting ads or paid content inside conversational AI". Currently, AI chatbots do not pass on the responsibility to pay for product showcases to brands or companies, but Meta's whole business strategy is based on the principle of digital ad placement selling. Hence, Meta which owns all the social and messaging products is all about advertising.
Meta is already making use of AI more broadly in its new more rudimentary "unconnected content" algorithm for social content suggestions and Zuckerberg asserted they produce more engagement in the app. And this certainly causes more viewership of more advertisements. However, 30% of the content FB users see is suggested by AI, and the same goes for the 50% of users from IG, he said.
Implementing the technique of selling access to AI models
Another unique way Meta may generate revenue from AI is through selling access to models as they go on to be larger. "Introducing mechanisms to allow people to pay to use bigger AI models and have access to more compute," as Zuckerberg stated yesterday.
Free of charge, Llama 3 and other large language models Meta is currently available to users and corporations that are under certain threshold limit. Charging for access might not be a way of implementation of Meta's "open source" approach here.
"Basically, if those technologies and products would evolve like we believe they will, they will open up a lot of business value for people." "I believe it is the right move and this is what we are going for."