Facebook parent Meta Platforms is now considered one of the leading players in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Two and a half years ago, company boss Mark Zuckerberg apparently didn’t know exactly what the AI department he set up was actually dealing with.
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At Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Mark Zuckerberg has made changing topics the company’s priority over the past few years, including the now failed cryptocurrency Libra and the Metaverse, which has so far only incurred high costs for the company. Zuckerberg was so convinced of the latter that he even renamed the company from Facebook to Meta Platforms in autumn 2021.
The company boss may also have been more focused on the metaverse when he met Sundar Pichai, CEO of the Alphabet subsidiary Google, at a conference in the summer of 2021. As “Bloomberg” reports, Pichai took this opportunity to praise Zuckerberg for an AI breakthrough by Facebook – although, according to insiders, he didn’t even know what the Google CEO meant. However, after the – probably rather embarrassing – encounter with Sundar Pichai, the self-made billionaire, according to the news site, requested a briefing about Meta’s work in the AI sector and from then on became more involved in the topic, which has now become a new top topic. has become the company’s priority.
Meta’s AI department was making progress behind the scenes
Mark Zuckerberg had already been interested in artificial intelligence at an earlier point in time. According to Bloomberg, the Meta boss founded a research group in 2013 that was named FAIR – an acronym for Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research. Since its founding, the department has been headed by computer scientist Yann LeCun, who, according to the news portal, is also considered one of the godfathers of AI. As a result, Meta’s AI department apparently worked largely in isolation, but that didn’t stop them from making great progress.
Although it is apparently still not clear what development Sundar Pichai was praised for in 2021, he seems to have been impressed by FAIR’s work. In fact, according to Bloomberg, in the years following its founding, the meta-research group was gradually able to establish itself as a real competitor to OpenAI or Google’s DeepMind and make some important breakthroughs in the AI field. These would include the development of the PyTorch software, which is used by developers to create AI apps, as well as the release of a bot that is better at the strategy game “Diplomacy” than most human players.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the AI topic was probably only interesting in connection with the Metaverse project and for sorting and recommending content on the company’s own social media networks. According to “Bloomberg”, this focus apparently did not shift even after the conversation with Sundar Pichai, but only with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. At this point, Meta was itself about to release the large language model LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) and From this point on, I placed a greater focus on generative AI. For example, according to the news portal, 60 FAIR employees were transferred to a new product group for generative AI.
AI at Meta now in the spotlight – different approach than competitors
“In terms of investment priorities, AI will be our largest area of investment in both technology and computing resources in 2024,” Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call last year, according to Business Insider. “We will continue to lower the priority of a number of non-AI projects across the company in order to dedicate employees to work on AI,” the Meta boss continued. Analysts viewed this move as positive. “These new ones [KI-]Businesses could become a significant source of income for Meta in the coming years,” said Tejas Dessai, analyst at Global “AI and open models like Llama – which have been downloaded over 100 million times – speak for themselves,” a company spokesman wrote in an email, according to the news site. According to “Business Insider”, the Facebook parent is now one of the leading players in AI -Area.
Meta takes a completely different approach to AI than its competitors and advocates an open source approach. For example, Meta’s AI language model Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) is published under the open source license to give other researchers the opportunity to use the software to develop their own projects. According to dpa-AFX, the model can recognize more than 4,000 spoken languages and is intended to revolutionize the translation, synthesis and transcription of languages.
“It was a very smart move by Meta to open source their models because in some ways they were a little late to the game,” Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, told Bloomberg. However, the open source approach now offers Mark Zuckerberg’s company some advantages, according to the news portal. In this way, the group can undercut competitors such as OpenAI, Google or Microsoft, some of which charge high fees for similar AI programs. In addition, Meta’s AI models could be developed more quickly as open source software because not only its own researchers work with the technology.
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