Meta in Pole Position on AI Entertainment

TikTok also in the Race

While yesterday we focused on Meta Founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in the company’s Quest series of AR/VR headsets vs Apple’s just announced Vision Pro, there was a bigger set of opportunities discussed at Thursday’s All-Hands meeting. 

This of course is separate and different from the company’s leading initiatives on Open Source LLM AI models and software research infrastructure I’ve written about in recent posts.  

These new Meta user facing efforts are about leveraging AI in Facebook/Meta’s world spanning social apps like Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and of course Facebook itself. Those reach over 3 billion people daily. Two items in the company’s all hands by Zuck on Thursday stood out in particular. 

“One, for example, will allow customers to use a text prompt to modify their own photos and share them in Instagram Stories.

Another will bring AI agents with different personalities and capabilities to help or entertain. That's focused initially for use in Messenger and WhatsApp.”

Both, as and when implemented, can shift the needle in what people do online with AI, just as TikTok (owned by Bytedance) has dented the online universe with AI/machine learning algorithms, licensed music, and short viral videos. 

The second item in particular, bringing “AI agents with different personalities and capabilities to help or entertain” is particularly potent. 

Recent AI unicorn Character.ai, founded by ex-super Googlers is already seeing millions of users.

“They speak to AI-generated characters, and assuage global loneliness. The company wants to show the world that chatbots can be the ideal delivery method for customized immersive entertainment.”

And it’s working. 

We are likely to see this emulated not only on Facebook properties, but also possibly on Bytedance’s TikTok and others like Snapchat and others. 

Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has seen this work, so seems to be implementing a ‘fast follow’, as he did with “Stories” vs Snapchat, and now “Reels” vs TikTok and Google/YouTube “Shorts” (videos). 

And as noted in an earlier post, Facebook/Meta is also moving aggressively to build AI centric Ad Sales to get ahead in that monetization effort of the AI services, for their 2 billion+ global daily users. 

Get ready for Meta trying to entertain with AI, at scale. Stay tuned.