Meta announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2023 on Thursday, with net income of $14 billion, or 201 percent higher than the same period a year ago. The results were so good that Meta launched its first dividend of 50 cents per share for its shareholders and will continue to offer a dividend on its stock every quarter.
However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear during his conference call with analysts that the company is setting its sites on both Microsoft and Google in terms of their AI businesses. Fortune (via Yahoo) reports that Zuckerberg considers the amount of data Meta has access to via Facebook and Instagram to be one of its big features to help develop powerful AI models. He added that the amount of videos and images on those services is "greater than the common crawl data set,"
Zuckerberg says that Meta is currently developing what the company hopes is "the most popular and advanced AI products and services" and that if they handle the development well enough, "everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done."
The story added another quote from Zuckerberg:
“It's clear that we're going to need our models to be able to reason, plan code, remember, and many other cognitive abilities in order to provide the best versions of the services that we envision,” he said. “We’re playing to win here, and I expect us to continue investing aggressively in this area.”
Meta has already launched an AI image generator for its social media apps, and it has been developing its own open-sourced large language models like Llama 2. Meta will likely have to spend a lot of money on AI GPUs. The company announced plans for such a chip in 2023, and this week, Reuters reported that a second-generation Meta in-house AI GPU is in development that could go into operation later this year.
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