Despite allegations that sales personnel have spent less time marketing the metaverse to advertisers, Zuckerberg said it’s business as usual at the organization formerly known as Facebook during Meta’s most recent quarterly earnings call. The CEO said, “A narrative has emerged that we’re somehow shifting away from focusing on the metaverse vision.
We have been concentrating on AI and the metaverse for years and will continue to do so, according to Zuckerberg.
For Meta, this is a difficult time. Investors worry that the expansive metaverse project is squandering money without making any money. The interactive world costs the company close to $10 billion a year. However, its Reality Labs division, which lost $13.72 billion in the prior year, recorded an operational loss of $3.99 billion in the first quarter of this year. Less than 200,000 people use its primary virtual platform, Horizon Worlds.
The firm cannot afford to leave the metaverse after its stunning launch in October 2021. With its strong branding, Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, claimed that Meta had effectively put itself in a box.
“Zuckerberg made an unusual commitment both in terms of money that was devoted to 3D-related pursuits and the very symbolic gesture of changing the company name,” the author claimed. “When changing your company name to the product name, you must follow through.”
The metaverse is having trouble, thus Meta is talking more about generative AI. On this month’s earnings call, Zuckerberg lauded Meta’s use of AI to fuel its ranking and recommendation algorithms and stated that the business was “exploring” ways to include generative AI into WhatsApp and Messenger as well as “visual creation tools” for Instagram and Facebook posts and advertisements.
Business communications with AI is common. Short-lived was M, Facebook’s 2015 AI and human-powered virtual assistant. To automate the numerous customer-business interactions that Facebook has, the company started developing pattern-matching AI.
After failing to live up to expectations, M closed in 2018. The company stated at the time, “We initiated this experiment to learn what customers needed and expected of an assistant, and we learnt a lot. Other Facebook AI efforts are being driven by these helpful findings.
How much of the company’s prior work on a comparable product can be applied is uncertain. According to early Facebook investor Roger McNamee, the IT sector has decided that boarding the generative AI gravy train is the best course of action for escaping the current economic crisis.
According to McNamee, generative AI is distinct from Facebook’s AI. But with loan rates at 5%, everyone is keen to get a piece of it because their existing techniques no longer work and they all require new ones.
As with Facebook, Meta frequently needs to adapt to industry trends. The company’s M text-based service was an effort to compete with software companies like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
In 2019, Facebook undertook an ambitious endeavor to capture a piece of the cryptocurrency-related hype cycle, developing its own digital currency, Libra. The Diem initiative ended quietly three years later.
“Five years ago, everyone was talking about blockchain, then the metaverse, and now AI,” said Ari Lightman, a digital media professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. Facebook had to catch up to the most recent trend, much like we’ve seen before when they bought Instagram to enter the photo-sharing area and WhatsApp to enter the messaging space.
There is still a lot of work to be done, and while Zuckerberg is positioning the business as a leader in AI research, generative AI is no different. The CEO of the firm mentioned “AI” more than two dozen times during the conference call, but gave little information regarding its generative AI product strategy. New AI products have been announced by Google and Microsoft.
“With the very self-conscious and repetitive mentions of AI, it’s like Meta is saying ‘don’t forget about us,’” Barrett said. “That’s not where a CEO wants to be in an ideal world.
Massive language model and generative AI developers have been competing against Meta for years. Due to its product lineup, Meta claims it is “uniquely positioned to adopt an end-to-end approach to generative AI that few organizations can offer”.
It is also unknown how experienced the company’s generative AI team is. Technical leads and product technical managers are vital to team building, and Meta has offered multiple such jobs in recent weeks. On teams, these occupations direct engineers and product managers. High-level goals and roadmaps are defined and directed by these positions. Post-doc research fellows are also being employed by the ethical AI team in the fields of “measuring bias” and “ethics governance.”
Meta remained silent.
Whether the corporation stays on the metaverse’s sinking ship or makes additional investments in AI, according to Lightman, it needs more money. TikTok and other applications are stealing young consumers away from traditional platforms. The gathering and sale of user data, Meta’s primary source of income, may be regulated.
He stated,“Meta is struggling in terms of how to diversify its revenue base, and finding out what happens if you put all your eggs in one basket with advertising and then the advertising finds a new platform. There are a lot of things beating down on the company at once.”
Content Source: theguardian.com
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