Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, has declared that the company intends to start commercialising its generative AI tools before the end of the year — with advertisers as the most important customers.
Bosworth said that Meta’s AI generative AI tools could be used to improve an advert’s effectiveness by telling the advertiser which tools to use when crafting the ad.
Rather than a brand using a single image in an advertising campaign, it could ask the AI to create multiple images designed to appeal to different audiences and save time and money.
Despite establishing its AI research lab a decade ago and being beaten to market by other AI businesses such as OpenAI with its ChatGPT, Bosworth told Nikkei Asia that:
“We feel very confident that … we are at the very forefront. Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams.
“[I] expect we’ll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It’s probably the area that I’m spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [chief product officer] Chris Cox.”
Bosworth also said that the tech will be used in, drumroll please, the metaverse!
“So previously, if I wanted to create a 3D world, I needed to learn a lot of computer graphics and programming. In the future, you might be able to just describe the world you want to create and have the large language model generate that world for you. And so it makes things like content creation much more accessible to more people,” he explained.
Bosworth is apparently unperturbed by the open letter and petition signed by the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak calling for a ban on AI development.
“I think it’s very important to invest in responsible development,” he said, “and we do that kind of investment all the time. However, it’s very hard to stop progress and make the right decisions on what changes you would make. Very often you have to understand how technology evolves before you can know how to protect and make it safe. And so I think, not only is it unrealistic, I don’t think it would be effective.”