The era of artificial intelligence as a kind of historical moment, if it has not yet fully become a state of affairs reflecting the content of the current condition of the global technology sector, then it will definitely be one soon since there are no more advanced functional systems and there is also no higher level of mass interest in other segments of the vast digital reality space, which is an example confirms Meta Platforms.
The mentioned company has made a bet on artificial intelligence in recent years. In general, the integration of AI into workflows and also into corporate digital ecosystems is already what can be described as a kind of general practice, but Meta demonstrates the maximum aspiration towards the formation of a sort of inner universe, the fundamental underlying matter of which is virtual reality. The technology giant aims to implement an ambitious and large-scale project called Metaverse. In this case, it means a kind of digital existential system consisting of different virtual worlds, in the space in which it is possible to implement various actions and forms of interaction, including social communication, learning, games, and much more. The corresponding Meta project is what can be called a long-term perspective. In this case, quick results are not envisaged, or at least unlikely, but the resulting space of vast digital existence, consisting of many sectors of virtual being, is an idea that justifies the costs and efforts designed to achieve a result separated in time from the present moment. It is worth noting that the online environment has actually become what can be called a new dimension of objective reality. It is possible that over time, a network of digital multifunctional systems will form a full-fledged virtual universe as a kind of new form of existence in a technologically evolving world. The online environment is unlikely to be able to fundamentally transform the spaces of the standard physical being, but it is already making significant changes that can become groundbreaking. Large-scale virtual ecosystems like Metaverse can become a basic element in the formation of a full-fledged digital universe. From the point of view of certain philosophical systems, the online environment cannot be characterized as a true reality conditioned by the nature of the world in its original form. The concept of materialism stipulates that the mentioned reality is exclusively the space of physical matter. At the same time, idealism, including within the framework of Plato’s doctrine, defines the space of ideas and forms as the true reality. According to the proponents of this worldview system, the mentioned space is more permanent and more genuine compared to the world of material objects. From an appropriate point of view, the online environment can be described as a kind of alternative universe.
Obviously, artificial intelligence, as a complex structure of digital thinking with the potential to become an independent form of consciousness capable of autonomous evolution without external impact, should become a kind of basis or at least an integral part of the fundamental platform for the existence of digital worlds. For this reason, the development of AI can be called the driving force behind the evolution of the virtual universe.
Meta is actively investing in artificial intelligence. In April, the technology giant announced a $10 billion increase in its spending for 2024. The corresponding financing is intended to scale investments in infrastructure to implement the company’s efforts in the area of artificial intelligence. In a certain sense, this statement was received with concern by investors. On the day when the technology giant announced an increase in spending volumes, the value of its shares dropped by as much as 19% in the evening. Over time, investors have come to terms with the fact that Meta intends to make large-scale financial injections in artificial intelligence. This month, the value of the technology giant’s shares reached a record high. Since the beginning of the current year, the corresponding indicator has grown by almost 70%.
Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said in October during a call with analysts that there are many new opportunities to use advances in artificial intelligence to accelerate the core business of the company, which should ensure a high level of return on investment over the next few years. Also, as part of a kind of conclusion from this statement, he noted that financial injections in AI should be increased.
Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg stated the positive impact of artificial intelligence on almost all aspects of Meta activities. In the relevant context, he separately noted that AI has played a key role in the rebuilding of the digital advertising business. The mentioned business faced difficulties after Apple’s iOS privacy update in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg also stated that artificial intelligence underpins more nascent projects of the technology giant, including smart glasses Ray-Ban Meta and experimental Orion augmented reality headset. In his opinion, the mentioned headset can represent the next computing platform.
Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on artificial intelligence are a kind of unequivocal evidence that AI has become a top priority for Meta. Machine intelligence is already having a significant impact on the technology giant’s business and generating new revenue opportunities for the company. In this case, there is an example of artificial intelligence being an important economic factor or driving force in the context of the dynamic of earnings. As a result of scaling up the practice of using machine intelligence, advanced technology can be transformed into a new platform for economic growth on a global level, and not just within individual industries or private cases.
Mark Zuckerberg is currently focused on integrating artificial intelligence into the products of his company. Meta views AI as a kind of infrastructure technology. Instagram and Facebook are gradually transforming into the category of traditional services, which are not a source of innovation, but a kind of digital environment for the implementation of advanced solutions.
It is also worth noting that there is currently increasing competition in the AI industry. The corresponding tendency is as natural as possible since artificial intelligence has already demonstrated significant capabilities as a working tool and as a means of processing huge amounts of information and generating original media content. Moreover, AI has significant development prospects. Some futurological forecasts suggest that artificial intelligence, in the course of its technological evolution, will transform into an independent form of consciousness that surpasses the human mind in terms of cognitive abilities.
Against the background of increased competition in the AI industry, all players in this space must respond to the strengthening contention by developing new products and digital thinking systems. The relevant circumstance of the current moment concerns both startups and large technology giants such as Meta. In the artificial intelligence industry, there is a kind of race for customers. Industry players such as OpenAI, which developed the chatbot ChatGPT, are showing significant results in the mentioned direction. Meta is also not an outsider in this case.
The OpenAI GPT family of artificial intelligence models helps to power virtual products not only in the space of the company’s virtual ecosystem but also beyond it. For example, Apple integrated ChatGPT into its devices. At the same time, other players in the area of artificial intelligence also have their own foundation development. Meta has a family of machine intelligence models called Llama. These models feed the latest features of generative artificial intelligence, such as the Meta AI digital assistant. The mentioned virtual product, which is a chatbot, is the way Mark Zuckerberg intends to introduce generative machine intelligence technologies to billions of users of the company’s online ecosystem platforms.
At Connect, Mr. Zuckerberg said that by the end of the current year, Meta AI will become the most used digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence in the world. It is worth noting that the company he heads is increasingly releasing generative machine intelligence features for advertisers. The technology giant’s corresponding efforts are aimed at increasing the effectiveness of its online advertising platform.
Last month, the company hired Clara Shih, who had been Salesforce’s chief executive officer of artificial intelligence. Meta aims to build a more enterprise-focused unit in 2025.
Analysts suggest that the technology giant’s comprehensive approach to artificial intelligence will allow it to achieve even greater success next year. Jefferies experts chose Meta as one of the generative AI winners heading into 2025. These experts, in a note published in the current month, stated that the vast user base of virtual platforms included in the digital ecosystem of the technology giant is one of the richest surfaces to introduce generative artificial intelligence tools.
Truist Securities analysts suggest that Meta AI may challenge Google’s Internet search system as an engine for responding to all types of queries. They also expect that next year, the company headed by Mark Zuckerberg will likely outperform the mentioned competitor. The corresponding vision is based on the fact that Meta can potentially benefit from activities related to providing businesses with more advanced chatbots for customer service. The forecast of the mentioned analysts is contained in a note that was published last week.
Jefferies experts stated that Meta has a unique opportunity to introduce next-generation artificial intelligence tools to almost 4 billion users and more than 200 million businesses across its app family.
The technology giant does not comment on external forecasts about the prospects of its activities, but at the same time, it clearly positions AI as a source of growth on a public level.
It is worth noting that the company has been increasingly making statements about the number of Meta AI users lately. In December, Mark Zuckerberg announced that there are currently almost 600 million monthly active users of the digital assistant.
The technology giant launched Meta AI last year. Initially, the company positioned this digital product as a competitor to chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence, among which ChatGPT was primarily meant, which debuted in November 2022 and became a kind of initial stage of the so-called AI boom. In April, Meta brought its virtual assistant to the forefront of each of its apps. The mentioned digital product was put in the search bars of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
At the same time, it is worth noting that the technology giant does not offer Meta AI to users as a stand-alone app. For this reason, the practice of using the specified virtual product differs significantly from the similar practice of ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. The functioning of the digital assistant as an autonomous system in the app format expands the possibilities of monetization to a certain extent. At the same time, the huge virtual ecosystem of the technology giant is likely to be able to compensate financially and in the context of artificial intelligence dissemination for the fact that Meta AI is not a stand-alone app. It is worth noting that this is an assumption, not a statement of a guaranteed result.
ChatGPT is currently the world’s most popular chatbot powered by machine intelligence. In terms of the number of users, this digital product is significantly ahead of its competitors. Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity follow ChatGPT by a wide margin in the ranking of the world’s most popular chatbots.
Data from the Similarweb web-tracking service indicates that the Meta AI website gets less than 10 million views per month. This indicator is lower than similar results from major artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and also mid-range industry players, including, for example, Anthropic.
Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li told analysts in July that India had become the technology giant’s largest market for Meta AI. She also separately noted that this usage has coincided with promising signs of retention and engagement on WhatsApp.
Advertising continues to be the main source of revenue for Meta. In the context of the corresponding state of affairs, it is logical that the technology giant is actively integrating artificial intelligence into the specified segment of its business structure. In December, the company reported that in one month, more than 1 million advertisers used generative AI tools to create more than 15 million ads. According to estimates by the technology giant, businesses, that applied artificial intelligence as an image generation tool, recorded a 7% increase in the conversion rate. In this case, there is another example of the effectiveness of AI as a working tool.
Stacy Reed, an online advertising and Facebook ads consultant, stated that within the framework of people’s perception, generative artificial intelligence can be associated with visually striking and sometimes surreal images derived from popular services such as Dall-E or Midjourney, but at the same time, the average small business advertiser uses Meta’s tools for more subtle tasks. Applying AI as part of the mentioned scenario in the digital ecosystem of a technology giant involves creating multiple versions of an ad’s headline, auto-resizing the size of ads so they look appropriate within users’ Instagram and Facebook apps, and repositioning certain images within the ads so that the promotions perform better.
Stacy Reed stated that advertisers who are already writing strong creative copies can use generative artificial intelligence tools from Meta to get a little bit more. It was also noted that many small advertisers do not associate new features with machine intelligence. In their opinion, as stated by Stacy Reed, Meta is just enhancing the way to build ads.
Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester, noted that most large companies and advertising agencies use more specialized marketing tools for their ads campaigns powered by artificial intelligence. Also, in the relevant context, it was underlined that the mentioned tools are more robust compared to similar built-in solutions from Meta.
At the same time, it is definitely beneficial for the company headed by Mark Zuckerberg from the point of view of financial results as a prospect in the framework of the mere introduction of simple tools powered by artificial intelligence. In the relevant context, it is worth mentioning that the technology giant, along with Google, dominates the digital advertising market.
Maurice Rahmey, chief executive officer of performance marketing firm Disruptive Digital and a former Facebook customer manager, said that Meta’s artificial intelligence tools should be good enough to squeeze out more investments from advertisers. In this context, it was noted that the appropriate approach is better for the business of a technology giant, even if small gradual changes are envisaged in this case.
After Meta hired Clara Shih from Salesforce in November, some analysts began to argue that the company could push an enterprise technology with the Llama family of open-source artificial intelligence models. Such statements confirm to one degree or another the thesis that for Meta, the most effective way to monetize AI is to develop functional solutions for using appropriate virtual products within specialized scenarios that solve specific work tasks. At the same time, the technology giant’s potential in the area of elaborating artificial intelligence as an advanced cognitive system that surpasses the human mind remains valid. The Metaverse project is not yet what can be called an already established form of large-scale digital reality, but it is on its way to an appropriate configuration of virtual existence.
Meta monetization head John Hegeman stated that Llama’s advancements represent a significant opportunity for businesses to drive more efficiencies and significantly improve the experiences they offer their customers.
Clara Shih rejoined Salesforce in 2020. Before that, she worked at this company from 2006 to 2009. As part of her latest experience at Salesforce, Clara Shih helped oversee Einstein GPT for Service and Sales. In this case, it means a virtual product powered by generative artificial intelligence, designed for sales and customer support staff. As part of the first stint at the specified company, Clara Shih created a business app that let users connect their Salesforce customer relationship software with their Facebook connections.
Multiple former Meta AI and product leaders told reporters that Clara Shi’s vast experience will be helpful considering the technology giant has failed in previous attempts at building enterprise software.
In May, the technology giant announced its intention to shut down Workplace, its product for business communication. After buying enterprise startup Kustomer for about $1 billion in 2020, Meta spun it out in 2023 as part of the deal, which was reportedly valued at $250 million.
Ralph Schackart, an Internet equity analyst at investment bank William Blair, reckons that the most logical move for the technology giant would be to create a larger business around WhatsApp. Also in this context, it was noted that the mentioned digital platform can help businesses build chatbots for customer service using generative artificial intelligence tools from Meta. Ralph Schackart stated that in the long term, it will evolve into customized sales agents, which is an industry with a financial volume exceeding the $3 trillion mark. It is worth noting that in the relevant context, the analyst commented on Meta’s WhatsApp business AI chatbot opportunity.
Artificial intelligence contains unambiguous positive prospects. The AI industry is at the stage of active development and high-intensity scaling. It is obvious that certain companies will benefit significantly from the relevant process and artificial intelligence as the most advanced technology of the current historical moment. In this context, the example of Nvidia is illustrative. The indicator of market capitalization of this company, which develops graphics processing units for training and ensuring subsequent operation of artificial intelligence systems, exceeded the $3 trillion mark in the current year. Technology giants such as Meta are more likely to benefit from the AI boom due to their significant resources and large-scale infrastructure. If the company headed by Mark Zuckerberg succeeds in implementing the Metaverse project, it will become the master of a kind of universe existing in the digital dimension of reality. Whether these prospects will become an accomplished fact will be known over time.
It is also worth noting separately that during the period of active development of artificial intelligence, the issue of cybersecurity has become more relevant. Scammers also have access to AI. To counteract the corresponding threat in cyberspace, personal awareness of users is important. For example, an Internet search query such as how to know if my camera is hacked will allow anyone to get information about signs of unauthorized access to the device. Digital literacy is an effective tool for countering cybercrime. Relevant knowledge should be updated periodically, as the evolution of technology is a permanent process. Artificial intelligence, like other technologies, can be used both in constructive scenarios and to implement illegal practices aimed at obtaining financial benefits or compromising certain individuals. At the same time, it can also be a tool for countering such criminal activity. The security of applying artificial intelligence is a popular topic for analysts and experts.
