Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to build new AI teams
Meta has created a new team dedicated to building a suite of artificial intelligence powered tools that could include “AI personas” that are designed to help people. It comes as Twitter owner Elon Musk is rumoured to be building a new research lab to create an “anti-woke” alternative to ChatGPT.
Writing in a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new top-level product group would be focused on generative AI to “turbocharge our work in this area”. It makes his company the latest in a long line of Big Tech businesses around the world to commercialise generative AI.
Meta has invested heavily in AI as a It seems AI is now becoming a core focus for the company as Zuckerberg works to focus on revenue-generating products. With the rise of AI in the public sphere, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT becoming the fastest growing consumer product in history, hitting 100 million active monthly users in January, and Bing launching its own AI chatbot, the technology is entering a commercial phase.
Google is also working on its own AI chatbot called Bard and plans to incorporate the technology throughout its product range and Microsoft is adding AI to Teams, Microsoft 365 and Azure. Chinese tech giants, including Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, are also working on chat products.
Commercialising artificial intelligence
Zuckerberg said Meta has formed the new division “The company plans to focus on adding creative and expressive AI tools to their existing products in the short term which will likely see AI filters added to Instagram, and generative text in WhatsApp and Facebook. There are likely to be a range of text, image and video tools across the range.
“Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’re exploring experiences with text, with, and with video and multi-modal experiences. We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”
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The product team will be led While Microsoft and Google have been bullish about incorporating AI widely into its products, Meta has been cautious with the technology previously, focusing on AI as a research play rather than a revenue generating product. This appears to be changing, although Meta says it will continue to have researchers working on longer-term AI projects outside of the product team, focusing on academic research Meta will publish and share widely.
Musk wants ‘anti-woke’ AI chatbot
Meanwhile, Musk is reported to have been approaching leading AI researchers to discuss creating a new lab designed to build an alternative to ChatGPT, including training new large language models.
His goal is apparently to create a chatbot without the perceived bias shown in text generated He is apparently in talks with Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who recently left DeepMind, the AI company owned Musk has praised and been critical of ChatGPT describing it as “scary good” in tweets and saying “we are not far from dangerously strong AI” which is also known as AGI or Artificial General Intelligence.
He has previously described AI as “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilisation” but has also said he would rather be alive now to witness AGI than in the past and not be able to see it come about. He said it needs to be regulated and according to Babuschkin, in an interview with The Information, building a chat tool with fewer safeguards isn’t an objective mentioned by Musk, rather the focus is on combating bias.