Meta Believes AI Investments Will Pay Off After Years But What’s Apple’s Situation?

The last few years have seen big technology companies pouring money into artificial intelligence (AI), owing to the revolution that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is bringing into business processes.

In the last month alone, OpenAI and its primary backer, Microsoft, have emerged as future big spenders with a plan to build a $100 billion data center and AI supercomputers, while others are indulging in partnerships and upgrades to their products and services.

The artificial intelligence boom has drawn in companies from various industries to develop their own tools, customized to their individual products and use cases.

However, with all the money being poured in, there is the question of return on investment (ROI) that comes up.

In this regard, social media leader and multinational technology conglomerate, Meta, revealed its position and plan regarding its investments in the technology.

So, what did the company reveal? Let’s explore!
 

What Did Meta Say About Its AI Investments?

 

• Recently, Meta conducted its first quarter earnings call with investors of the company and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened by addressing the company’s position regarding AI.

• In the opening minute, Zuckerberg said, “So, let’s start with AI and the metaverse. We’re building a number of different AI services, from our AI assistant to augmented reality apps and glasses, to APIs (application programming interfaces) that help creators engage their communities and that fans can interact with, to business APIs that we think every business eventually on our platform will use.

• [Contd.] “AI will help customers buy things and get customer support, it will write internal coding and development APIs for hardware, and a lot more.”

• This week, Meta released its newest artificial intelligence model, Llama 3, calling it the “most capable openly available LLM to date”.

• The company also revealed its new artificial intelligence assistant, Meta AI, which is ready to be deployed across its products, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and comes with a real-time image generator.

• Moving forward, Meta’s plan is to invest even more in AI, including its intention to acquire around 350,000 NVIDIA H100 AI chips by the end of the year.

• With each chip costing between $20,000 and $40,000, the projected cost of the chips alone is set to reach an average of $10.5 billion.

• Even though the company has been turning a profit, the CEO conveyed that it could take years for the company’s investments in GenAI to pay off.

• In fact, as per the earnings call, the company spent $5 billion more than it initially forecasted.

• As of now the AI assistant is available for free, however, Zuckerberg revealed that the company could follow OpenAI’s stance on its advanced models like GPT-4 and DALL-E and monetize its models in the future.

• Zuckerberg said, “There are several ways to build a massive business here, including scaling business messaging, introducing ads or paid content into AI interactions, and enabling people to pay to use bigger AI models and access more compute ... And on top of those, AI is already helping us improve app engagement, which naturally leads to seeing more ads and improving ads directly to deliver more value.”

 

What’s Happening With Apple?

 

• While Meta has been a player in the artificial intelligence game for a while, there was a late entry for the world’s second largest company by market capitalization, Apple.

• However, the company has entered the field with a few tricks up its sleeve, including partnering with industry leader Google to bring its Gemini AI engine into the iPhone. On the other hand, the company has also reached new heights with groundbreaking advancements in multimodal AI technology, as shown through an AI research paper release.

• Furthermore, the company’s latest artificial intelligence tool ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling) can 'see' screens and can understand screen context as per another research paper.

• Ahead of this, reports find that Apple is planning on-device and server-based language models, with the thought being that the offline, on-device model capabilities would extend to perform tasks that are simple and could be free. This would also save the company server costs.

• Its server-based tools will provide more advanced features and will mostly be paywalled.

• However, Apple fans might have to wait till its WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) event in June to discover what the company’s plans are and its investment returns.

Do you think Meta and Apple can capture a strong position in the AI industry with their moves, despite entering the arena later than their competitors?

Let us know in the comments below!