Meta is going hard into AI (both hardware and software), which is great to see. Something that's not super obvious is what specific features of existing apps require AI, that is, how will Meta get return on investment?
Two uses I can think of are i) text and image content moderation on fb and instagram (won't need as many human reviewers if bots are as/more effective), and ii) chatbots for businesses (businesses could provide their business documentation to a meta LLM which could handle customer inquiries via messenger and whatsapp).
Meta actually has a whole separate, existing AI research and use case for targeting ads that has seen much better results as their AI capabilities have improved. I don't think gen AI is used for this in the way most commenters think, but the improvements in AI architecture / infra, training, etc. are all helpful to the AI which helps ad targeting while simultaneously building more powerful Gen AI
This isn't it. Actually FB, the app specifically, is having an unexpected uptick in users in the younger demographics, partly from their strategy of using FB marketplace and other ancillary services to bring people back to the main app.
EDIT: Also, it's very easy to creat fake profiles on FB, and other people do it all the time. Meta don't need to do it themselves
Meta is building and scaling the infrastructure for AI and then they can resell that at a premium later. All these articles do is highlight the challenges of rolling out your own infra, if Meta solves these issues it becomes a reference and get a bigger piece of the AI pie.
They want to become the AI backend for the Fortune 500
This is fair guess on intuition but working in recommender space on both content/ad recommendation, content understanding signals have pretty consistently across two companies and many projects tended to underwhelm and key signals are generally engagement signals (including event sequences) and many embeddings (user embedding, creator embedding, ad embedding, etc).
The main place I’ve seen content understanding help is coldstart specially for new items by new creators.
And you wonder sometimes if the products being advertised, themselves, couldn't matter more than the targets reading them. We've learned to recognize crappy offering and AI can try to make me read more and more ads relevant to what I'm saying, if it's a crap product, I won't pay anyway :(
Generative environments on demand for their VR goggles seems like something that could drive net new revenue some day, both hardware and subscriptions. If they can find a PR safe way to provide adult content that would be even better.
Or, virtual conversational humans for their boomer userbase could be a hit.
Two uses I can think of are i) text and image content moderation on fb and instagram (won't need as many human reviewers if bots are as/more effective), and ii) chatbots for businesses (businesses could provide their business documentation to a meta LLM which could handle customer inquiries via messenger and whatsapp).
Anything else?