Meta Platforms Inc. now aims to be seen as a leading player in the artificial intelligence race.

In a meeting today with employees at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg insisted AI is the company’s main priority going forward.

The company is looking to incorporate cutting-edge AI technologies into both its existing platforms — Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — as well as the metaverse, the virtual reality world that Zuckerberg is convinced represents the future of how people will work and play online.

Zuckerberg’s pep talk, which was first reported by Axios, comes at a troubled moment for Meta, which recently let go about 10,000 staff. The layoffs have reportedly shaken the confidence of employees, and the CEO took the opportunity to reassure them of the company’s plans, laying out a roadmap for the future that’s heavily focused on incorporating the latest advances in generative AI, which creates new content and images based on natural language prompts.

“In the last year, we’ve seen some really incredible breakthroughs — qualitative breakthroughs — on generative AI and that gives us the opportunity to now go take that technology, push it forward, and build it into every single one of our products,” Zuckerberg told employees at the meeting. He added that the company plans to bring generative AI to people in “new ways that other people aren’t going to do.”

Meta has long been at the forefront of AI research and regularly open-sources much of its work, but the company has been forced to sit on the sidelines with regard to generative AI, where the biggest buzz has come from the likes of Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI LP, Google LLC and startups such as Cohere Inc.

However, Zuckerberg insisted that Meta is not standing still and is planning to incorporate generative AI into his favorite pet project, the metaverse. The company has been sinking billions of dollars every quarter into that nascent business in an effort to make virtual worlds a reality, and now it’s looking at ways generative AI can aid those plans. In particular, Zuckerberg spoke of the potential generative AI has in creating 3D visuals.

The company has made a number of internally created generative AI tools available to its metaverse teams, Zuckerberg said. At the same time, the company also plans to host an internal hackathon where workers will be allowed to show off their latest ideas and projects in generative AI.

Elsewhere, Meta has plans for a new generative AI feature in Instagram that will allow users to edit images using text prompts.

Also in the works are “AI agents” for Messenger and WhatsApp. The idea with these agents is that users will be able to engage with sophisticated AI chatbots for entertainment and educational purposes, Zuckerberg said. What wasn’t made clear is when we can expect to see these new features launch, but the implication is that Zuckerberg wants to see them go live sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, Meta’s internal AI research teams remain committed to their work and will continue to share much of it with the open-source community, the CEO said.

Zuckerberg found time to criticize Apple Inc.’s new Vision Pro virtual reality headset announced at this week’s WWDC 2023 developer conference. The Vision Pro is perhaps the closest competitor to Meta’s Meta Quest Pro headset, though it will cost more than twice as much. In the meeting Zuckerberg said Apple’s device didn’t present any major technology breakthroughs that Meta hadn’t already explored.

“I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important,” Zuckerberg reportedly said. “By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.”

Photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr