Meta Platform’s artificial-intelligence (AI) teams will soon be combined into a new product team to implement AI technology into Meta products such as Facebook.
Key Details
- The new product team will report to Meta CPO Chris Cox and be led by former Apple employee Ahmad Al-Dahle.
- Last week, Meta released LLaMA, a language model, through an open-source license.
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave insight into the new project: “In the short term, we’ll focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways…”
Why it’s news
Tech companies are racing to implement new generative AI technology into every aspect of their business and products, and Meta is no exception.
Generative AI technology is quickly becoming an exciting new addition to nearly every tech company, regardless of size. While Meta has long been researching ways to implement AI tech into its products, the company is historically more cautious than Microsoft and Google concerning AI.
By creating one product team focused on AI, Meta can more quickly integrate new language models and other development into its existing products like Instagram, Facebook, and even the metaverse.
Meta’s individual research teams aren’t going away completely. Separate teams will still work on long-term AI projects outside the product team’s goals. These teams will continue Meta’s ongoing academic AI research, which it already publishes and shares externally.
“We’re exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences,” says Zuckerberg. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”
Backing up a bit
Meta isn’t the only tech company implementing AI software. Spotify has announced the release of its new AI-powered DJ that will learn users’ music preferences and select new content for them.
The music streamer is releasing the new DJ in its beta phase. Listeners will receive a personalized lineup of music along with commentary about the tracks and artists voiced by the AI.
Spotify’s DJ will review a user’s listening history to calibrate his music tastes. It will circulate older songs a user likes and pick out newer additions. Users can fine-tune the AI’s selections by giving feedback. If a song doesn’t seem right, users can skip a song, providing the DJ with more data to select songs.