Meta Platforms Embraces Artificial Intelligence while Staying Committed to the Metaverse

Meta prioritizes artificial intelligence as evident in its $9 billion investment in Nvidia chips. According to Mark Zuckerberg, the company is dedicated to training a cutting-edge AI model and has publicly announced its ambition to develop artificial general intelligence.

It’s an exciting endeavor for Meta. Meanwhile, investors seem to have moved past the previous hype surrounding the Metaverse, even though the company’s name still serves as a reminder of that ambitious venture.

During early trading on Friday, Meta’s stock showed a 1.3% increase, reaching $380.96 per share. Considering that the stock had plummeted due to a digital advertising downturn and substantial losses attributed to Metaverse development in 2022, these positive numbers bode well for the company.

Unlike before, things are looking optimistic for Meta after persevering through 21,000 layoffs and riding a bullish tech-stock market. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg must convince investors that this time he will succeed in delivering on promises related to groundbreaking technology.

Thankfully, no one is questioning Zuckerberg’s judgment this time; investing in AI has become imperative for Meta and other major tech players. Companies like Microsoft, Google’s parent Alphabet, and Amazon.com are already engaged in an AI arms race, while Apple is gearing up to release its own line of AI-enabled smartphones.

The Future of Facebook’s Metaverse: AI and Challenges

More worrying, however, is Zuckerberg’s conviction that AI will eventually help his Metaverse bet pay off.

The Connection Between AI and the Metaverse

“The two major parts of our vision—AI and the metaverse—are connected. By the end of the decade, I think lots of people will talk to AIs frequently throughout the day using smart glasses like what we’re building with Ray Ban Meta,” Zuckerberg wrote Thursday on Meta’s microblogging platform Threads.

AI Applications for Meta’s Platform

Some applications of AI to Meta’s platform are straightforwardly sensible. Finding ways to recommend more attractive content to Facebook and Instagram users and better target advertising are the company’s bread-and-butter and should boost earnings immediately.

The Challenge for Zuckerberg

But the CEO’s commitment to the metaverse leaves him with an additional challenge: Zuckerberg must prove that any attempts to fuse AI with virtual worlds won’t take him down the wrong path, especially when, once again, billions of dollars worth of investment are at stake.

At least up until now, the market hasn’t been convinced by Meta’s efforts to build virtual or augmented-reality hardware. When Zuckerberg announced the Quest 3 headset last year, the stock dropped until he started talking about AI software.

If investors are happy when Zuckerberg talks AI and unhappy when he talks the Metaverse, then his insistence on bringing the two together could look ill-judged.