Facebook and Instagram parent MetaPlatforms is betting that artificial intelligence will persuade people to spend more time on its social media apps next year and is using the technology to make the biggest technological change on its social platforms since the launch of short-form video Reels in 2020.

The company is currently testing more than 20 different new generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) functions on its family of 3 billion user applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, covering multiple mainstream application scenarios such as search, advertising and commercial information. Eventually, Meta says it will apply these new generative AI tools globally.


"We always come back to these questions: How can we create a better community? How can we help people express themselves better? How can we build more useful products." Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's vice president of generative artificial intelligence, said in an interview. "If we do a good job, that usually shows up in the metrics. We do see more usage, more positive feedback, people having a lot of fun on our social platforms."

Meta is under intense pressure to generate incremental revenue as the tech giant continues to provide new reasons for its family of more than 3 billion users to continue using its apps while convincing investors that its record spending in other areas, such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, is worthwhile.

In the opinion of many analysts,Meta’s core business, the advertising business, has resumed its growth trend. Especially on its Instagram and Facebook, Meta has been vigorously promoting short videos called Reels. Therefore, with the support of new generative AI technology, the scale of Meta's advertising business is expected to continue to expand.

In terms of the number of users, in the third quarter, the total number of daily active users of the Meta family of applications (including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) increased by 7% to 3.14 billion, while analysts’ average estimate was 3.05 billion.

Meta is currently facing fierce competitive pressure from TikTok. The average time spent by the latter's US users on the short video platform is almost twice that of Meta's applications. At the same time, Snap (SNAP.US), the developer of "disable after reading" software, and Adobe (ADBE.US), the developer of Photoshop software, have launched AI chatbots, image editors and video creation tools embedded with generative artificial intelligence, making Meta face increasing competitive pressure.

Therefore, Meta has recently insisted on investing billions of dollars in infrastructure, talent and key project research and development.to keep up with the emerging global artificial intelligence arms race. During what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the "Year of Efficiency," artificial intelligence was selected as the most critical area for the company's internal investment and revenue growth, far more important than the previous "Metaverse" that also cost a lot of money.

Unlike leaders in the AI ​​field such as Microsoft and OpenAI, although much of Meta's work in artificial intelligence is carried out in a low-key manner out of the public eye - such as building expensive data centers around the world and constantly updating the open source version of the large language model (LLM) that powers AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Although Meta has done a lot of backend work and infrastructure construction in AI, it has launched relatively few new AI products to consumers, and the market response to these new products has been mixed.

Looking ahead to next year, the company aims to add a variety of new capabilities to its MetaAI. MetaAI is an exclusively developed virtual assistant that can be used in all its software and platforms to answer user questions and generate realistic images. The AI ​​tool can be used for one-on-one or even group chats, as well as for Meta's augmented reality (AR) glasses.

For example, MetaAI's proprietary image editing tool Imagine is available on the desktop, and all images generated based on generative artificial intelligence on Meta's family of products will soon receive invisible watermarks, indicating that they were produced with MetaAI.


"We hope it will become one of the most used artificial intelligence assistants in the world," Ahmed Dal said. He also said that Meta is also testing a more novel feature that allows the tool to pull Reels into MetaAI’s AI chat interface and explore obtaining important content from other third-party services.

Meta also hopes that more third-party developers will use its AIStudio to develop diverse AI chatbots for global businesses and creators. These chatbots will be designed to be suitable for businesses and creators and can communicate and interact with users on Meta’s applications (such as Facebook, Instagram, etc.) on their behalf. In short, Meta encourages third-party developers to use the AI ​​tools and resources provided by its platform to develop chatbots that can effectively communicate with users, thereby enhancing the Meta user experience and supporting the construction of Meta's business and creative ecosystem.

On Facebook, Meta’s largest social platform, new artificial intelligence tools for groups and markets are expected to add conversation topics or items that require careful reading in the future. Additionally, Meta is expanding its image-editing tool Imagine beyond a mere chat function into a site where enthusiasts can create free images. At the same time, all AI-generated images will have an invisible watermark to indicate which ones were produced by AI.

A technology giant that cannot be ignored in the global AI boom—Meta

In a recent earnings conference call, Meta CEO Zuckerberg repeatedly mentioned AI. Compared with the hot wave brought by generative AI, the hot Metaverse concept in the past two years has become much less popular.Meta has been deeply involved in the field of AI for many years. It has a number of core patents in the field of AI and ranks as a leader in the field of AI with technology giants such as Microsoft and Google. The deep learning framework PyTorch, once led by the Facebook team, can be described as the most important "base" of LLM.

With the advent of consumer-centric generative artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT and Google's Bard, more and more technology companies around the world are participating in the craze of deploying AI technology, which may promote a decade-long era of AI prosperity and development.According to a latest report released by Bloomberg Intelligence analysts led by Mandeep Singh, the total revenue of the generative artificial intelligence market is expected to grow from US$40 billion last year to US$1.3 trillion by 2032. This market is expected to increase 32 times in 10 years, growing at a compound rate of up to 42%.


Market expansion is centered first on strong demand for the infrastructure needed to train artificial intelligence systems, followed by strong demand for subsequent devices that use artificial intelligence models, ad placement, software applications and other types of services, according to the Bloomberg Intelligence research team.The user application side such as advertising and software applications is undoubtedly the area in which Meta is most proficient. Especially in the advertising business field that Meta relies heavily on, Meta is launching a number of beta AI tools, striving to incorporate AI technology into the advertising business and bring new advertising models to corporate customers.

In terms of stock ratings and stock price expectations, expected data compiled by investment research platform SeekingAlpha shows that,Wall Street analysts gave Meta a consensus rating of "Buy" and an average price target of $373.86, implying a potential upside of 17% over the next 12 months. Since the beginning of this year, with the help of the AI ​​investment boom, Meta's stock price has risen as high as 165%. Among the "Seven Big Technology Giants" in the US stock market (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, NVIDIA, Amazon and MetaPlatforms), the increase is second only to AI chip leader NVIDIA.