Zuckerberg Says Meta Will Add Generative AI To All Its Products

In Meta’s Q1 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed when and how generative AI will be integrated into its products.

“The major focus of our AI work is foundation models to enable a lot of new use cases, including Generative AI,” he said on the call.

“The work happening now is going to impact every single one of our apps and services. And I’m incredibly excited to ship more of the things that we’re building over the coming months.”

The company is exploring visual creation tools for Facebook and Instagram ads and posts, as well as video and multimodal interactions in the future, he said. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth previously teased out generative AI-powered ad creation tools in an interview with Nikkei.

ChatGPT’s success has made generative AI a hot tech trend, compelling tech companies of all sizes to explore integrating the technology into their platforms. Meta introduced an AI language model called LLaMA to researchers earlier this year, but it has yet to release a widely accessible product comparable to ChatGPT. It has, however, added AI-powered recommendations to Instagram Reels.

Meta’s late adoption of AI-friendly hardware has left the company scrambling to catch up, according to a report from Reuters. The company has been working on a massive project to improve its AI infrastructure, with capital expenditures increasing by about $4 billion a quarter.

Meta is already seeing some business improvements from using AI. Zuckerberg said AI-powered Reels recommendations have driven a more than 24% increase in time spent on Instagram. Reels monetization efficiency is up over 30% on Instagram and over 40% on Facebook quarter-over-quarter, as a result of that.

But don’t call this a pivot away from the metaverse: Zuckerberg clarified that he believes generative AI will be able to support the multi-billion investment the company has been making into mixed reality experiences, making it easier for users to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code.

More importantly, Zuckerberg is positioning its generative AI strategy to support WhatsApp’s B2B customer support business.

“I also think that there’s going to be a very interesting convergence between some of the AI agents in messaging and business messaging,” he said.

“Once you light up the ability for tens of millions of small businesses to have AI agents acting on their behalf, you’ll have way more businesses that can afford to have someone engaging in chat with customers.”