Meta’s Investments in AI Infrastructure Already Paying Off

Meta Platforms is investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and already seeing results.

The tech giant’s investments in AI infrastructure have already paid off by boosting ad impressions on its family of apps by 26% year over year and decreasing the average price by 17%, Seeking Alpha reported Tuesday (May 9).

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, said Tuesday (May 9) during a virtual conference that Meta could be a real player in AI, according to another Seeking Alpha report.

These reports come four days after Reuters said Meta added 10 people experienced in AI networking technology in February or March.

The team had previously been building AI networking technology at British chip maker Graphcore and were added by Meta as part of its efforts to boost its data centers’ ability to handle the demand from the company’s teams who are building AI features, according to the report.

“They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta’s data centers,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

As PYMNTS reported April 28, “AI” was mentioned more than 200 times on the latest earnings calls by Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet.

Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during the call that, “We’ve been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both.”

He added that, in his view, progress in the metaverse and generative AI are connected in key ways, noting that “metaverse technologies will also help deliver AI. For example, embodying AI agents will take advantage of the deep investments we’ve made in avatars over the last several years.”

Zuckerberg added that, already, more than 20% of the content users see in their Facebook and Instagram feeds are recommended by AI.

Meta has been centralizing staff who are working on AI technology from across the company to achieve faster breakthroughs that it can apply to different products.

The company’s AI strategy is to have “more relevant content recommended by our AI systems,” Zuckerberg said, rather than the existing model where people “follow” accounts.

The company told investors on an earlier earnings call that it will leverage AI in the short term to improve ad targeting and user engagement with its short-form video product Reels.