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Meta looks to ‘turbocharge’ generative AI work

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2023

Facebook parent company Meta is looking to “turbocharge” its work in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

This was revealed yesterday by Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on Facebook.

“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” says Zuckerberg.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data.

ChatGPT, DALL-E and Bard are popular generative AI interfaces.

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes as big tech companies jostle to take the lead in the AI space.

In January, software giant Microsoft announced a “multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI, the start-up company that developed viral bot ChatGPT.

Google is also testing its newly-developed conversational AI-powered chatbot, Bard, which is expected to rival AI start-up OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The Brainy Insights estimates the generative AI market will grow from $8.65 billion in 2022 and reach $188.62 billion by 2032.

According to the insights, most commercial industries view generative AI as improving their workflow and thus increasing their productivity.

It adds that commercial sectors are investing in generative AI to strengthen their working algorithms. Further, with growing technological advancements, many companies opt for generative AI in producing their products, it notes.

Says Zuckerberg: “We’re starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products.

“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. 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.

“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.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reports Ahmad Al-Dahle will lead the new product team, which will report to Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, a company spokesperson confirmed.

It notes this will enable Meta to more rapidly implement the AI research team's findings in Meta's products, the spokesperson said.

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