Mark Zuckerberg repositioned Facebook as Meta and spent billions to build the metaverse business. However, ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 eclipsed the metaverse craze, and there was a shift towards generative AI.
Facebook too decided to join the AI race by merging two of its advanced AI divisions into one group so as to strive towards AGI and AI chatbots. It is in search for AI talents that Zuckerberg released an Instagram Reel. He focused on investments in AI chips and the company’s work on Llama 3 LLM.
AI will be put to use in different areas — AI assistants, AI creators, AI planning, AI coding, AI memory and AI cognitive abilities. Facebook will concentrate on consumer facing AI products.
Facebook needs ML researchers and engineers. Some of these may be working in rival companies. There is a prediction that the main interface of AI with public will be through AI personal assistants. These will plan for us vacations and will book restaurants and flight tickets. They will compose letters and create other types of content. Facebook should not lag behind in this area.
The competition for high-priced talent is fierce. Google reportedly offers seven figure stock options to some of the engineers to lure them. Facebook too woos this rarefied talent. It wants to convey that it is an opportunity to work on ambitions projects.
There is a lot happening on unsupervised learning, where patterns are learnt without labelled data. There is gaming where complex strategy games like Diplomacy are played. There is an area of machine translation and computer vision. There is Llama 2, though not as powerful as GPT-4 or Gemini.
Facebook’s chief scientist LeCun thinks AGI is possible, but we are far from it. Sometime back AGI was techobabble for Facebook. It has discarded this technobabble thinking already.
Facebook commands good compute power. Facebook will have 3.5 lac Nvidia’s chips (H100) and 6 lacs H-100 equivalents. It also uses its own custom-built AI chips. Rivals share their chips with cloud computing clients, whereas Facebook does not deal with cloud clients.