Instagram and Facebook-owner Meta is developing an AI system designed to power Facebook’s entire video recommendation engine across all its platforms, said Tom Alison, the head of Facebook, at an event in the US recently.
Alison said it’s part of Meta’s “technology roadmap that goes to 2026” and involves developing an AI recommendation model that can power Reels, the short video service and more traditional, longer videos, CNBC reported.
The report, mentioning Alison’s remarks, stated that Phase 1 of Meta’s tech roadmap involved “switching the company’s current recommendation systems to GPUs from more traditional computer chips, helping to improve the overall performance of products.”
As interest in LLMs exploded last year, Meta executives were struck by how these big AI models could “handle lots of data and all kinds of very general-purpose types of activities like chatting,” Alison was quoted in the report.
The possibilities of a giant recommendation model that could be used across products, prompted Meta to build “this kind of new model architecture,’ Alison said, adding that the company tested it on Reels.
As per Alison, the new “model architecture” helped Facebook obtain “an 8-10 percent gain in Reels watch time” on the core Facebook app.
With a large internet population, India is one of Meta’s largest global markets. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in India in the first week of March, to attend the pre-wedding festivities of Anant Ambani, the youngest son of Reliance Industries Ltd’s chairman Mukesh Ambani. The events held in Jamnagar, Gujarat, also saw Microsoft’s Bill Gates in attendance.
Zuckerberg is said to be on an Asia tour as he arrived in South Korea this week, where he is expected to hold talks on artificial intelligence and have meetings with President Yoon Suk Yeol and the heads of some of the country’s tech powerhouses.
Meta has been ramping up its AI efforts, including plans for a custom chip and adding AI functions into products.
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