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| Meta introduces new AI tool for social media platforms. (Source: Reuters) |
The meeting took place at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, USA, and was connected to other offices around the world.
According to Reuters , at this meeting, Meta executives revealed an upcoming Instagram feature that will allow users to edit photos through a text prompt and another feature that can create emoji stickers for messaging services.
This announcement comes as Meta has recently faced financial difficulties and has been forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers. The company’s evolution from Facebook to Meta has also put it in crisis, especially its ambition to shift its operations from social networking to the metaverse.
While Meta is still struggling and spending $10 billion a year to develop the metaverse, competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat have announced a slew of AI tools in their products, leaving Meta "unsettled".
Meta has yet to launch any general consumer-facing AI products, though last month the company announced it was working with a small group of advertisers to test tools that use AI to generate backgrounds and text variations for their ad campaigns.
Meta has reorganized its AI divisions and spent heavily on building infrastructure, having identified early last year that it lacked the hardware and software capabilities to support AI product needs.
During the meeting, founder Zuckerberg said that advances in general AI over the past year have now helped the company build and apply the technology "into every single one of our products."
In addition to consumer-facing tools, executives at the meeting announced a virtual assistant for employees called Metamate that can answer questions and perform tasks based on information gathered from the company's internal systems.
Many of Meta’s AI tools will be built on open source code, allowing users to build their own AI chatbots. Meta has been criticized by other tech companies, competitors, and critics for using open source code to spread misinformation and hate speech on a larger scale.
According to the New York Times , at the meeting, in order to address concerns about Meta's open source approach, the Facebook founder said that "democratizing access to this data has a lot of value" and hopes that, in the future, users can build their own AI programs without relying on available frameworks from some large technology companies.
Despite its new focus on AI, Zuckerberg said the company isn’t giving up on its plans for the metaverse. “We’ve been focused on both AI and the metaverse for many years now, and we’re going to continue to focus on that.”
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