 |
|
|
|||||
One day after Meta rolled out its standalone AI app, Mark Zuckerberg has shared more about how the company plans to eventually monetize its generative AI assistant. During the companys first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta AI could one day show ads and product recommendations. He also hinted at plans for a subscription component for those who want a more premium version of the assistant. "I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads, as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality or intelligence, Zuckerberg said. He added that for now the company is more focused on growing Meta AIs usage. (He announced yesterday that Meta Ai had reached almost 1 billion monthly users.) I expect that we're going to be largely focused on scaling and deepening engagement for at least the next year before we'll really be ready to start building out the business here, he said. Zuckerbergs comments just one day after Meta introduced its standalone AI app underscores how important the assistant is to the company. The Facebook founder has repeatedly said he wants Meta AI to be the most used AI assistant in the world, and he said on Wednesdays call that a standalone app would be particularly important for attracting US users. Metas strategy for monetizing the assistant in many ways mirrors its approach to Threads, which only just began expanding its early experiments with ads this month long after it reached hundreds of millions of users. Speaking of Threads, Zuckerberg also shared some new milestones for Threads, saying that text-based app now has 350 million monthly active users and that time spent on the platform has increased 35 percent over the last six months thanks to improvements to the companys recommendations systems. Later in the call, Metas CFO Susan Li shared that the company has also been testing its Llama model to power Threads recommendations and that the addition of the large language model has led to a 4 percent increase in time spent. It remains early here, but a big focus this year will be on exploring how we can deploy this for other content types, including photos and videos, she said.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-a-mulling-ads-and-a-premium-version-of-its-ai-assistant-mark-zuckerberg-says-225202560.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Google has announced that it's helping to financially support the electrical training ALLIANCe (etA), an organization formed by the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electricians. The goal is to train "100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices in the United States" to meet the growing power demands of AI. Using AI will unlock unspecified, but positive economic opportunities, Google's new white paper, "Powering a New Era of American Innovation," claims. In order to take advantage of them, though, the US power grid needs to become more capable and efficient. That's largely because the data centers used to run and train AI models require vast amounts of energy. The white paper claims that new data centers could demand an additional "15-90 GW" of energy by 2030, something that more efficient chips and model training can't account for. For a sense of the scale, the US Department of Energy says 1 Gigawatt is the equivalent to 103 offshore wind turbines. Google's paper calls for investments in alternative energy sources like nuclear power, but also notes that expanding the electrical workforce is necessary. "McKinsey estimates that 130,000 additional electricians will be needed by 2030 to build out data centers and manufacturing facilities," the company writes. Currently, though, retiring electricians outnumber newly trained ones. "Nearly 10,000 American electricians either retire or change careers each year, while only about 7,000 new entrants join the field." Investing in electrical training is Google's attempt to help change that. It would be nice if it was paired with a clearer explanation around what that AI will be doing with all that extra power Google notes that there's a "causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth" but skilled job training isn't a bad thing.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-is-funding-electrician-training-to-help-meet-the-power-demands-of-ai-221320678.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Mark Zuckerberg says he believes most of the Meta's code will be written by AI agents sometime within the next year-and-a-half. Zuckerberg made the prediction during an hour-long interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. "I would guess sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we'll reach the point where most of the code that's going towards these efforts is written by AI," said Zuckerberg, referring to the company's efforts to build internal AI agents. "And I don't mean like autocomplete... I'm talking more like you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can improve things, it can find issues, it writes higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already." Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg:"within 12-18 months, most of the code is written by AI"It wont just be autocomplete.AI agents will set goals, run tests, find problems, and write better code than top engineers. pic.twitter.com/2del08UA45 Haider. (@slow_developer) April 29, 2025 This is not the first time Zuckerberg has made this type of prediction. During his awkward appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year, he said, "Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code." Notice how the goal posts have moved. Less than five months ago, Zuckerberg said coding agents that could effectively replace most human programmers were within reach. Now, those same systems will not arrive by mid-2026 at the earliest. The changing timelines underscore exactly why we should be critical of the AI industry and its many promises. AI agents may very well one day replace mid-level programmers, but right now predictions like the one made by Zuckerberg and many others are, at best, advertisements for technologies that don't yet exist and may never perform at the level their advocates say they will. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/mark-zuckerberg-predicts-ai-will-write-most-of-metas-code-within-12-to-18-months-213851646.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||