san francisco The Facebook group Meta wants to get more involved in the race for artificial intelligence. When asked about the success of systems like the chatbot ChatGPT, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday: “These are fascinating things.” Zuckerberg announced that his company would be introducing a number of its own products later this year.
The AI-supported creation of text or images could help deliver content for meta-products such as Facebook or Instagram. “We want to help the users of our apps to be even more creative,” said Zuckerberg.
However, before such tools can be rolled out for the billions of users of platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, technological hurdles would have to be cleared.
Currently, the automated creation of text or images still costs pennies, said Zuckerberg. That is still too much for large scaling. Improvements are still needed here, said Zuckerberg. “There are different approaches that we’re taking right now,” Zuckerberg said.
ChatGPT is a program from the start-up OpenAI that can produce complex texts in many languages on command. ChatGPT belongs to a group of programs capable of performing creative tasks, which experts call generative artificial intelligence. This also includes programs such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, which can produce detailed images from just a few words.
Shortly before OpenAI, Meta also presented its own AI chatbot, the Blenderbot. However, this was mostly limited to much shorter answers. In addition, the bot repeatedly produced racist and anti-Semitic statements in tests.
The Galactica tool, which like ChatGPT is based on large language models, was launched in November. But after just three days, Meta disabled the tool from the public again after it was criticized for misrepresenting scientific studies.
Meta has been working on AI technologies for many years. Acclaimed researcher Yann LeCun leads the division at Meta. In a discussion round a few days ago, he said: “As far as the underlying technologies are concerned, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative.”
“OpenAI isn’t particularly advanced compared to the other labs,” said LeCun. “It’s not just Google and Meta, it’s a half-dozen startups that basically have very similar technology,” LeCun added.
At Meta, a number of solutions are in preparation. “There are about 12 million businesses that advertise on Facebook, and most of them are small businesses that just don’t have the resources to design a new, beautifully designed ad,” LeCun noted. “So for them, generative art could be a big help.”
LeCun then tweeted: “If Google and Meta haven’t published anything similar to ChatGPT, it’s not because they can’t. But because they don’t want to.”
Large corporations cannot afford to make mistakes like small start-ups. “By releasing public demos, which, no matter how impressive and useful, have major flaws, established companies have less to gain and more to lose than money-hungry startups,” LeCun wrote.
ChatGPT was also repeatedly criticized for producing false statements or inventing sources. Unlike the chatbot Blenderbot from Meta, however, no anti-Semitic or racist statements were initially known.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg made the announcements for new products during the presentation of the quarterly figures. High costs for severance payments and the restructuring of the group brought Meta a surprisingly sharp drop in profits. However, the parent company of the online network Facebook signaled a recovery in advertising revenue, which had been weak for a long time. The stock rose 18 percent in after-hours trading.
For the current quarter, the US group expects sales of 26 to 28.5 billion dollars. Analysts had previously forecast an average of $27.14 billion. In the last quarter of 2022, however, profit collapsed by 55 percent to $ 4.65 billion, more than expected. Meta announced the first wave of layoffs in the company’s history in November. 11,000 jobs are to be cut. This was preceded by a drop in profits.
Meanwhile, the number of users continues to grow. Facebook now has two billion daily active users – an increase of 16 million within three months. At least one Meta app was last used by 2.96 billion users per day, up from 2.93 billion three months earlier.
With agency material
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