I'd argue that Meta's income derives in no small part from their best in class ad targeting.
Being on the forefront of
(1) creating a personalized, per user data profile for ad-targeting is very much their core business. An LLM can do a very good job of synthesizing all the data they have on someone to try predicting things people will be interested in.
(2) by offering a free "ask me anything" service from meta.ai which is tied directly to their real-world human user account. They gather an even more robust user profile.
This isn't in-my-opinion simply throwing billions at a problem willy nilly. Figuring out how to apply this to their vast reams of existing customer data economically is going to directly impact their bottom line.
5 minutes on facebook being force-fed mesopotamian alien conspiracies is all you'll need to experience to fully understand just how BADLY they need some kind of intelligence for their content/advertising targeting, artificial or not...
You probably don't spend enough time on their sites to have a good ad targeting model of you developed. The closer you are to normal users, with hundreds of hours of usage and many ad clicks, the more accurate the ads will be for you.
Same terrible experience for me while I was on FB.
I was spending a lot of time there and I do shop a lot online. They couldn’t come with relevant ad targeting for me.
For my wife they started to show relevant ads AFTER she went to settings and manually selected areas she is interested in.
This is not an advanced technology everyone claim FB has.
People look at all the chaos in their AI lab but ignore the fact that they yet again beat on earnings substantially and directly cited better ad targeting as the reason for that. Building an LLM is nice for them, but applying AI to their core business is what really matters financially, and that seems like it's going just fine.
Being on the forefront of
(1) creating a personalized, per user data profile for ad-targeting is very much their core business. An LLM can do a very good job of synthesizing all the data they have on someone to try predicting things people will be interested in.
(2) by offering a free "ask me anything" service from meta.ai which is tied directly to their real-world human user account. They gather an even more robust user profile.
This isn't in-my-opinion simply throwing billions at a problem willy nilly. Figuring out how to apply this to their vast reams of existing customer data economically is going to directly impact their bottom line.