NEW DELHI : According to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, his goal is to make the company a world leader in AI, both in terms of quality and usage. To realise goal, the company will continue to invest in AI to develop different services, Zuckerberg said while speaking at a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday. The social media giant has increased its capital expenditure projections to $35–40 billion for 2024 from a prior range of $30–37 billion to support its ambitious AI research and product development efforts. The company expects capital expenditures to increase in 2025 as well.
Zuckerberg, while speaking at a conference call with analysts to discuss Meta’s first-quarter earnings report, said the company is building a number of different AI services. “So let’s start with AI. We’re building a number of different AI services, from Meta AI, our AI assistant that you can ask any question across our apps and glasses, to creator AIs that help creators engage their communities and that fans can interact with, to business AIs that we think every business eventually on our platform will use to help customers buy things and get customer support, to internal coding and development AIs, to hardware-like glasses for people to interact with AIs, and a lot more,” he said.
Latest launch
Last week, the company released the new version of Meta AI, which is now powered by its latest model, Llama 3. The initial rollout of Meta AI is going well, Zuckerberg said, adding that tens of millions of people have already tried it. He claimed the feedback is positive and people are asking Meta to release Meta AI for them wherever they are. The company has started launching Meta AI in some English-speaking countries and it will soon roll out in more languages and countries.
“We believe Meta AI with Llama 3 is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use. Now that we have a superior-quality product, we are making it easier for lots of people to use it within WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook,” said Zuckerberg.
“AI is already helping us improve app engagement, which naturally leads to seeing more ads and improving ads directly to deliver more value. So if the technology and products evolve in the way that we hope, each of those will unlock massive amounts of value for people and business for us over time,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook, Insta trends
According to Meta, right now about 30% of the posts on our Facebook feed are delivered by the AI recommendation system. That’s up 2x over the last couple of years, and for the first time ever, more than 50% of the content that people see on Instagram is now AI-recommended. “AI has also been a huge part of how we create value for advertisers by showing people more relevant ads. And if you look at our two end-to-end AI-powered tools, Advantage+ shopping and Advantage+ app campaigns, revenue flowing through those has more than doubled since last year,” he said. On Instagram, reels and video continue to drive engagement with reels alone now making up 50% of the time that’s spent within the app. “Threads are growing well too. They’re now more than 150 million monthly activities, and it continues to generally be on the trajectory that I hope to see,” Zuckerberg said.