Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the company’s employees in a meeting to discuss the future of the company. The speech was an attempt to take the tech company out of a tumultuous period in its 18-year history, during which it made significant cuts to its workforce and faced barriers in taking its virtual reality ambitions mainstream.
During the talk, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out a roadmap for how Meta’s artificial intelligence and virtual reality developments would be integrated into a concept called the “metaverse.” As part of this roadmap, he elaborated on plans to create artificially intelligent “agents” to assist people across all of Meta’s apps, democratizing access to AI models so that more people can use them than Meta’s competitors’ models.
Meta intends to use these AI assistants to help people “create content to express themselves and their ideas better.” This technology can also be used to serve customers in products like WhatsApp. Mr. Zuckerberg also clarified that Meta is betting heavily on open-source technology and intends to share its AI work with researchers interested in building their own algorithms using Meta’s technology.
Critics argue that allowing open-source access to AI algorithms could result in dangerous and malicious uses of intelligent systems, but Mr. Zuckerberg defended Meta’s approach, stating that open-source software can enable greater outside scrutiny of the technology.
Despite Meta’s ongoing efforts to develop A.I. technology, the company remains focused on virtual reality and its plans for the metaverse. The company plans to bring its AI assistant into the next version of its smart glasses, and new generative A.I. technology could help people create new virtual world items and experiences. Furthermore, Meta recently took a jab at Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro headset, highlighting its cost and claiming that Meta had spent years bringing down the price of its headsets to $500.
“Our vision of the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social and about people interacting and feeling closer in new amazing ways. By contrast, every demo Apple showed was someone sitting on a couch by themselves,” Mr. Zuckerberg added.
In short, Mr. Zuckerberg’s speech aimed to rally Meta’s workforce and get the company back on track. He reiterated that Meta would continue developing its virtual reality and AI technology with the metaverse as the overarching goal. While the focus is on developing innovative technology, Meta will also need to balance this with ensuring that the use of that technology doesn’t have harmful effects on society.
