“[Individual Artificial Intelligence or AI agents like chatbots are] going to improve a lot of the interactions that people have with businesses… it should alleviate one of the biggest issues that [Meta’s] currently having around messaging monetization,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, while talking to investors about the company’s future plans for generative AI-based products.
During an earnings call, Zuckerberg talked about how Meta has planned on building three basic categories of products/ technologies using generative AI. Of these, he anticipated that the “fastest direct business loop is going to be around helping people interact with businesses” via AI agents.
“How we think about [the use of AI agents] compared to some others in the industry is we don’t think that there’s going to be one single AI that people interact with, just because there are all these different entities on a day-to-day basis that people come across, whether they’re different creators, businesses, apps or things that you use,” said Zuckerberg.
AI agents useful where cost of labour is low: Meta said that the success of business messaging, as it has observed in Thailand and Vietnam, could spread everywhere once every business gets its own AI agent.
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“For a person to interact with a business, it’s quite human labor-intensive for a person to be on the other side of that interaction, which is one of the reasons why we’ve seen [the use of AI agents] take off in some countries where the cost of labor is relatively low,” said Zuckerberg.
Why it matters: Meta’s conversation with investors has shown its keen interest around Artificial Intelligence and wanting to make its product like LLaMa 2 ‘accessible’ to all. However, it then put restrictions on big tech companies to make business arrangements for LLaMa’s use – violating some of the criteria of ‘open source.’ Now, the company’s pointed focus on using its AI technology to further monetise messaging indicates that while it may claim to make its tools open source, the priority is still to make profits off of this technology.
Generative AI to help with advertising: Aside from business interaction, Meta’s second category for AI product usage is for advertising. It will use generative AI powered features to help advertisers run ads without having to supply as much creative. For example, if advertisers have an image but it doesn’t fit the format, they can use the AI-powered tools to fill in the image for them.
Generative AI to improve internal functioning: The third category of Meta’s products will focus on internal productivity and efficiency. One example was that generative AI products can help engineers write code faster and thus help people internally understand the overall knowledge base at the company.
Meta unsure about scaling and expenditure: The company said it is unsure about how quickly these products will scale and thus are still in talks about the amount of AI capital expenditure to bring online.
“The reality is we just don’t know how quickly these will scale. And we want to have the capacity in place in case they scale very quickly,” said Zuckerberg.
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