​Meta unveils AI to create ads and metaverses

TOKYO -- Facebook owner Meta intends to commercialize its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December, joining Google in finding practical applications for the tech.

The company, which began full-scale AI research in 2013, stands out along with Google in the number of studies published.

"We've been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, told Nikkei in an exclusive interview on Wednesday in Tokyo. "We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people."

Meta announced in February that it would establish a new organization to develop generative AI, but this is the first time it has indicated a timeline for commercialization.

The technology, which can instantly create sentences and graphics, has already been commercialized by ChatGPT creator OpenAI of the U.S. But Bosworth insists Meta remains on the technology's cutting edge.

"We feel very confident that ... we are at the very forefront," he said. "Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams.

"[I] expect we'll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It's probably the area that I'm spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox."

Bosworth believes Meta's artificial intelligence can improve an ad's effectiveness partly by telling the advertiser what tools to use in making it.

He said that instead of a company using a single image in an advertising campaign, it can "ask the AI, 'Make images for my company that work for different audiences.' And it can save a lot of time and money."

Advertising is a monolith of revenue for Meta, which hopes to eventually apply the technology to all of its products and services, including Facebook and Instagram.

The technology will also be used in the metaverse, a highly realistic virtual space Meta is eagerly developing. "So previously," Bosworth said, "if I wanted to create a 3D world, I needed to learn a lot of computer graphics and programming. In the future, you might be able to just describe the world you want to create and have the large language model generate that world for you. And so it makes things like content creation much more accessible to more people."

Meta established a research lab for AI in 2013 by inviting Yann LeCun, a French scientist and leading expert on the technology to join the effort. It was second only to Google in the number of citations in major studies published on AI in 2022, according to AI research analysis platform Zeta Alpha, based in the Netherlands.

While expectations are high for generative AI to handle multitudes of tasks with great efficiency, concerns persist, particularly about humanity's control of civilization. In March, the U.S.-based nonprofit Future of Life Institute launched a petition asking that development of the technology be paused for at least six months. The petition has gained the support of American entrepreneur Elon Musk and others.

Bosworth said his response to the petition's request is "no."

"I think it's very important to invest in responsible development," he said, "and we do that kind of investment all the time. However, it's very hard to stop progress and make the right decisions on what changes you would make. Very often you have to understand how technology evolves before you can know how to protect and make it safe. And so I think, not only is it unrealistic, I don't think it would be effective."

This material is taken from the website https://asia.nikkei.com.