Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company remains committed to implementing a strategy to create a metaverse.
During a telephone conversation about earnings, the head of the firm said that financial activities are currently continuing to invest in initiatives and projects of the business structure headed by him that are related to artificial intelligence. Separately, he noted that the creation of a digital space of virtual existence continues. In this case, the implementation of the metaverse project is implied.
Mark Zuckerberg says that the company has been working on developments in the field of artificial intelligence and the virtual universe for many years parallel. He stated that these areas of activity are priorities for the technology giant. Also, according to him, the metaverse and artificial intelligence are largely related to each other and complement each other.
The implementation of the project to create an alternative space of being in the digital plane has become an expensive effort for the technology giant. In 2022, the Reality Labs division working on Metaverse generated revenue of $2.2 billion, but the losses of this structural unit of the company were recorded at $13.7 billion over the same period. Special attention should be paid to the fact that the intensity of expenses associated with the virtual universe project is increasing. In 2021, $10.2 billion was spent on this project with revenues of $2.3 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg said that the current state of affairs within the metaverse project, including in the financial aspect, is part of a complex, long-term, and ambitious roadmap. At the same time, he informed investors that he could not guarantee them the correctness of his vision of the concept of activity within the sphere of high technology and its advanced trends, but assured them of the sincerity of his position on the assumption of the current direction of the transformation of the world based on innovative products of various scales of influence. Mark Zuckerberg, in the context of explaining his vision of the future, for example, gave the assumption that all people who now have glasses, after a certain period, will have smart glasses.
The implementation of the metaverse project does not prevent the technology giant from being active in the field of artificial intelligence. This summer, the company released a new open-source version of its LLaMA 2 AI configuration, which is available for free for commercial use and research. Mark Zuckerberg noted that open-source software allows more people to test it in the plane of practical application and identify its shortcomings to eliminate them later, resulting in an overall improvement in the quality of the system.
On the occasion of the presentation of the new version of the machine intelligence model, the company also published a blog post stating its commitment to an open approach to ensure expanded access to the most important AI technologies for the benefit of businesses around the world. Meta in this case provides an opportunity to use its products based on digital intelligence to developers and individuals who are interested in software as such, opening up space for various experiments.
At the same time, many other companies operating in the field of AI restrict access to their technologies and establish control over the process of their use, stating that these actions are justified by security considerations and fears of misuse of products based on machine intelligence. There is an opinion that such a strategy is aimed at establishing a balance beneficial to certain firms in the competition space.
At the same time, the contract with Meta for the use of LLaMA 2 stipulates that companies whose monthly active users number from 700 million people must request a license to access the AI model.
The transition of Mark Zuckerberg’s company to open source, according to some experts, indicates that the firm wants to become the default provider of artificial intelligence within the existing technological ecosystem. For competitors, this Meta’s solution has already become a problem. For example, Microsoft has to prove the validity of a monthly fee of $30 for access to its AI functions.
As we have reported earlier, Meta Says Generative AI and Metaverse to Evolve Together.
