Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past nine months battling hard as the company has slashed its workforce and struggled to gain mainstream traction with its ambitious plans for virtual reality. rice field.
On Thursday, he told Meta employees how he plans to get the company back on track. During the plenary session, Zuckerberg laid out recent job cuts and gave the first vision of how Meta’s work in the artificial intelligence space would merge with its virtual reality plans, dubbed the Metaverse.
Zuckerberg’s speech was an attempt to rally staff after the most tumultuous time in the company’s 18-year history. The chief executive said the company had made a “tough decision” to cut jobs with the goal of “building a better technology company” that ships better products faster. He believed that Meta, which had swelled to more than 80,000 employees at its peak, was not doing well due to the pandemic.
“We want to use this period to rebuild and evolve the culture,” said two people who attended the meeting and commented to The New York Times.
Zuckerberg made the remarks in a speech lasting about 15 minutes before thousands of employees at Meta’s Menlo Park, Calif., campus. The talk, which took place in an outdoor pavilion the company calls “Hacker Square,” was live-streamed to tens of thousands of employees around the world.
It was one of Meta’s few large all-hands conferences in the last three years and included presentations from other Meta executives, including Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. It was
Meta has been active in AI for several years, but has been slower than competitors such as Google and Microsoft in applying its research to consumer products. Zuckerberg on Thursday detailed plans for artificial intelligence “agents” to help people across all of Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
He said Meta will work to create an artificial intelligence model that can be used by more people than its competitors, eventually fitting into Metaverse’s plans.
“Democratizing access is consistent with our product vision of enabling more AI, not just one AI,” Zuckerberg said, according to two people who spoke to The Times. . “Our goal is to build new AI products that support and scale human connectivity.”
He describes it as an AI assistant that helps people “create content to better express themselves and their ideas,” or perhaps a “coach that gives advice and encouragement” when people are feeling down. I imagine an artificial intelligence version.
AI agents could serve customers in products like WhatsApp, the world’s favorite messaging app that Meta is committed to making into an important tool for business owners and customer service. I have. And every company will be able to use personalized AI algorithms.
“People have different interests, and we’re going to need a variety of AIs to represent all those different interests,” Zuckerberg said at the conference.
To that end, the company is betting heavily on open source technology. That means sharing research on artificial intelligence with researchers who want to build their own algorithms using what Meta is already doing. Over the past decade, the company has spent billions of dollars building systems that run AI and recruiting top researchers to tackle the world’s toughest computer science problems in AI.
Meta has been criticized for its approach.researcher and politician External sources say exposing AI algorithms to many others could create malicious, automated and intelligent systems that accelerate the spread of misinformation. Critics say such sophisticated algorithms need to be tightly controlled.
Zuckerberg defended Meta’s strategy in his speech. He said open source software would allow millions of engineers to see the technology, further enhancing external scrutiny. He said working closely with the advancements of outside companies will make Meta’s platform better.
Zuckerberg also said he wants a world where people can build as many different AI programs as they like, rather than relying on a few AI programs offered by two or three big tech companies.
Zuckerberg said that doesn’t mean Meta is pulling back from the Metaverse project that gave it its name. Programs using new generative AI technologies could ultimately help people build new virtual world items and experiences, he said. And the company said it plans to introduce an AI assistant into the next version of its smart glasses. (Meta launched smart Ray-Ban glasses in 2021, but sales were sluggish.)
He also noted Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro headset, a $3,500 high-tech goggle that promises to usher in a new era of “spatial computing.”
“I was very curious to see what they would ship. It bodes well for our own development that they don’t have magical solutions to the laws of physics that we haven’t studied yet,” he said. said in a comment. . Zuckerberg criticized the device’s premium materials and cost, noting that Meta has spent years driving down headset prices. To the next version starting at $500.
“Their announcement really shows how our visions and values differ and what is at stake in shaping this platform,” Zuckerberg said. “Our vision for the Metaverse and Presence is fundamentally social, about people interacting in amazing new ways and feeling closer. It was all someone sitting alone on the couch.”
