How Meta Plans to Incorporate AI Into Its Products
Meta Platforms, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, is racing to incorporate generative AI into its family of apps and the metaverse after ChatGPT took the world by storm last November. Playing a central role in this effort is Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox. Wall Street Journal senior personal-technology columnist Joanna Stern spoke with Cox at the Journal’s annual Tech Live conference.
Cox talked about Meta’s plans for wrapping artificial intelligence into its products, its introduction of chatbots played by celebrities such as Naomi Osaka and Snoop Dogg, and the potential of AI to help businesses. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation. Awe-inspiring WSJ: Take us back to November 2022.
ChatGPT just launches. It becomes clear this is going to be a huge thing. Mark Zuckerberg calls you.
What does he say? COX: We had been doing advanced research in natural-language processing and machine learning for years. We had made important contributions to open source, including things such as PyTorch, which is an important part of how developers can have easier access to machine-learning tools. AI also has been a very important part of our products for a long time.
If you look at Reels and TikTok specifically, one of the reasons these products are so successful is because of the application of machine learning and sparse networks on the problem of recommending content. And that goes all the way back to 2017. WSJ: But when it becomes clear that ChatGPT is going to be a consumer product, you guys somehow shifted to thinking, “Hey, we’ve got to get something out there." COX: We were surprised at its quick success and just really impressed.
It’s a nicely done product. It was very thoughtfully created. It has that
. Read more on livemint.com
