At the end of last February, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is starting to get serious about artificial intelligence or AI, by creating a special team to work on it.
This announcement is not too hyped, there is no press release or anything like that. He only announced it through a post on his Facebook account, just like many other announcements.
In the post, Zuck mentioned that Meta now has a team dedicated to building tools that use AI as the basis. Including "persona AI" designed to help people in various ways, and also in various applications and services owned by Meta.
More specifically, Zuck mentioned that the AI that is being worked on focuses on experiences in the form of text such as Messenger and WhatsApp, then there is also experience in the form of images (photos or videos) such as Instagram's creative filters and ad formats.
This special team is reportedly led by Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's VP for AI and machine learning, who previously worked in Apple's special product division, as quoted by us from The Verge, Sunday (5/3/2023).
"We are creating a new product group at the highest level at Meta that focuses on generative AI to advance our work in this area. We have a lot of ground work to complete before we can achieve a futuristic experience, but we are very excited about all the new things that will be developed in line with this," continued Zuck.
It must be admitted, Zuck's move was taken after OpenAI via ChatGPT suddenly became very popular with the public. Almost all large technology companies are already working on AI, and Zuck's announcement can be said to be the most recent, because previously there were Google, Snapchat, and even Microsoft that directly increased their investment in OpenAI and incorporated ChatGPT into Bing.
After discovering this new "toy", some say Zuck will leave the metaverse, his old "toy" which a few years ago became the focus of Meta (even to the point of changing Facebook's name to Meta).
But so far, there is no information or reference that mentions the metaverse will be forgotten by Zuck and Meta.