Meta Introduces Artificial Intelligence Enhancements to Increase Popularity
Meta Platforms Inc. is placing its bets on artificial intelligence to persuade individuals to increase their usage of its social media applications in the coming year. The company is utilizing this technology to implement the most significant alterations across its platforms since the introduction of short-form video Reels in 2020.
The company is currently testing more than 20 different creative AI features, from search to ads, business communications and more, across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Eventually, it will apply these tools globally.
We always come back to the question: ‘How do we create a better community? How do we help people express themselves? How can we build more useful products,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, said in an interview. “It usually shows in the metrics if we’re doing a good job. We see more usage, positive feedback, people enjoying themselves.”
Metal is under pressure to give users new reasons to spend time on its apps, which generate most of the company’s revenue, while convincing investors that record spending on other projects like artificial intelligence and virtual reality is worth it. Meta’s main social platforms are advertising, but Facebook and Instagram users have largely dropped to 2 billion and 3 billion people per month, respectively.
Meta faces stiff competition from TikTok, whose US users spend nearly double the average amount of time on the short-form video platform than Meta’s apps. Meanwhile, Snap Inc. and Adobe Inc., maker of Photoshop, have launched chatbots, image editors and video creators infused with generative artificial intelligence.
Meta is spending billions on the infrastructure, talent and development needed to keep up with the emerging AI arms race. During what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the year of efficiency,” artificial intelligence was singled out as a key area of the company that saw investment and growth rather than cuts.
While much of Meta’s AI work hasn’t happened from the perspective of the general public—such as building expensive data centers and releasing open-source versions of the extensive Llama language model that powers chatbots—the few new consumer products have been small and varied. notice.
Next year, the company plans to add features to Meta AI, a virtual assistant that can answer questions and create photorealistic images. The tool can be used in one-on-one and group conversations, as well as Meta’s augmented reality glasses.
“We want it to be one of the most used AI assistants in the world,” Al-Dahle said. Meta is also testing the ability to allow the tool to pull reels into its conversations and possibly content from other third-party services, he said.
Meta also hopes that more third parties will use its AI Studio to build chatbots for businesses and content creators that can talk to people on their behalf in apps.
On Facebook, new AI tools in Groups and Marketplace suggest topics to join or items to explore. The company is expanding its image manipulation tool, Imagine, taking it beyond discussions to a website where hobbyists can create free images. At the same time, all images created by AI will receive an invisible watermark that indicates which images were created by AI.
