• by Colin Kirkland , January 19, 2024

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company's next steps toward investing in artificial intelligence -- highlighting plans to open-source the emerging technology, build an infrastructure, fuse the company's two leading AI research groups, and connect Meta's efforts to its ongoing metaverse development vision.

“Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads. By building out automated general intelligence (AGI), Meta is investing in a system that could potentially automatically enhance the user experience across its family of apps. To be clear, however, AGI is still a theoretical possibility.

“We’ve come to this view that, in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence,” Zuckerberg told The Verge. “I think that's important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems.”

To help build out a “massive amount of infrastructure,” Zuckerberg says Meta is investing heavily in Nvidia's H100 GPUs, the industry's desired chip for building generative AI.

At 150,000 units, Meta was on par with Microsoft's purchase of H100 shipments in 2023, which is triple the amount of any other company's investment.

Zuckerberg says that by the end of 2024, Meta will have stockpiled almost 600,000 GPUs.

To further enhance the building process, Meta is also committed to bringing the company's two major AI research groups –– FAIR and GenAI –– “closer together” and growing both teams to fast-track the work.

The Meta CEO also made it clear that the company's AI focus will connect directly to its long term metaverse strategy. “By the end of the decade,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I think lots of people will talk to AIs frequently throughout the day using smart glasses like what we are building with Ray-Ban Meta.”

AI developments, in Zuckerberg's view, would also mean the potential for creating entire virtual reality environments via AI-generated voice prompts.

The Meta CEO told The Verge that Meta will be releasing a new platform this year that allows users to create their own AI characters, otherwise known as bots, and use them across Meta's social apps.

Meta is still committed to spending over $15 billion per year on evolving its metaverse division, Reality Labs, with hopes of AI playing a direct role in its hardware offerings moving forward, including its Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Overall, Zuckerberg is positioning Meta's mission as one of connecting its billions of users –– and maybe AI bots –– across the globe in new ways, and AI is a key factor in future developments.