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Ten thousand layoffs turned around and embraced AI, and Meta was going to change its name again

Ten thousand layoffs turned around and embraced AI, and Meta was going to change its name again

Among the four giants of American technology, Meta is now the most lonely.

Not long ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited China, whether it was to mingle with ordinary customers in Sanlitun or meet with the Minister of Technology, he was warmly welcomed. Microsoft has once again become a popular fried chicken because of its investment in OpenAI, although Google was caught off guard by Microsoft on ChatGPT, but it also fought back in time and was still expected by the outside world.

On the other hand, Meta on the side, previously all in the meta-universe was renamed "Meta", but the meta-universe is being abandoned by some big manufacturers. What is more worrying is that Meta not only did not get much dividends from the metaverse, but kept coming out with bad news - its performance was further dragged down by the metaverse, and it planned to lay off another 10,000 employees, and so on.

When stuck in the quagmire, Zuckerberg, the helm of Meta, had to consider new growth points. In a letter to employees, Zuckerberg said that building the metaverse remains central to defining the future of social, but that's not where Meta will invest most of its money.

Where are the new areas where money is being invested heavily? It is the AI that is all over the world today. Zuckerberg said the biggest investment right now is advancing AI and building it into every product. Not long ago, Meta made a major breakthrough in the AI model - released the image segmentation model SAM, which can be used to identify objects in images and videos, and realize image segmentation according to text instructions and other ways, commonly known as "cutout", Meta's stock price continued to rise after the news came out.

Obviously, capital is still quite satisfied with Meta's new actions in AI. However, the AI track is crowded with powerful opponents such as Google and Microsoft, how many competitive chips does Meta have?

01 Meta's "New AI Story"

Zuckerberg did not abandon the metaverse, but changed his focus to AI.

In letters to employees, Zuckerberg repeatedly emphasized that AI will deliver amazing experiences. Today, the image segmentation model SAM will be the first to bring a good user experience.

If you deduct the diagram, you will find that although it seems simple, it is extremely draining energy and patience, and the cut out diagram is often unsatisfactory, SAM solves this pain point very well. For any photo, SAM can quickly identify all objects in the photo and divide them into different sections, which users can click to edit, accurate and efficient. Moreover, SAM has another breakthrough, that is, even if a certain shape is not touched during training, it can be accurately recognized and segmented in the image.

Ten thousand layoffs turned around and embraced AI, and Meta was going to change its name again

Source: Network

Of course, the function of SAM is not just "cutout", some doctors use SAM in case files, which provides great help for condition analysis. Many people in the industry believe that SAM is to computer vision what GPT is to large language models.

In this way, Meta still has two brushes on AI.

Not only is it engaged in its own research and development, Meta has also "open source" some AI technologies. In February this year, Meta released a new series of large models, LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI). At the time, Meta claimed that while LLaMA was only "one-tenth" the size of ChatGPT, it performed better.

Initially, LLaMA was not open sourced, but a week after its release, it suddenly leaked on the anonymous forum 4chan, which is equivalent to open source in disguise. Some people think that Meta accidentally leaked it, and others believe that Meta deliberately did it to compete with ChatGPT.

Regardless of the purpose, LLaMA sparked a large number of downloads after it was open source, and models built on it sprang up, and Stanford recently released a model Alpaca fine-tuned by LLaMA 7B, with performance comparable to GPT-3.5.

Judging from the momentum and results of the layout of AI, Zuckerberg is going to have another "all in" this time.

02 What is the powerful layout?

In the past, he did not hesitate to change his name for the meta-universe, but now he regards AI as a treasure, and it can only be said that a generation of new people is better than the old. It must be understood that Meta began to deploy AI for a long time, why does it keep claiming to attack forcefully at this time?

Ten thousand layoffs turned around and embraced AI, and Meta was going to change its name again

Source: Network

Naturally, because of the decline in performance, it is necessary to tell a new story to the capital market.

For the whole year of 2022, Meta's total revenue was US$116.609 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 1.12%, and its net profit was US$23.2 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 41.07%, which is also its first decline since 2010.

Like many internet companies, Meta relies on advertising as its main source of revenue. In 2022, advertising revenue in the Meta app family revenue decreased by 1% year-on-year, compared to a 37% increase in 2021, a significant gap.

While its own decline, rival TikTok has shown greater resilience. Last year, Internet advertising revenue around the world was declining, Meta was also involved, but TikTok became the only Internet platform with a significant increase in advertising revenue, Zuckerberg looked red. Although TikTok CEO Zhou was harassed by US congressmen not long ago, TikTok still shows greater growth potential than Meta.

Another "culprit" that dragged down Meta's performance is its aII in metaverse business. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the revenue of the Metaverse segment was US$727 million, down 17.1% year-on-year; The loss for the period was $4.279 billion. The loss for the whole year of 2022 was 13.717 billion US dollars, an increase of 34.57% compared with the loss of 10.193 billion US dollars in 2021, and the metaverse business is still a bottomless pit that burns money.

The combination of various unfavorable factors is reflected in the capital market, which is that Meta's stock price continues to fall. Zuckerberg has to make a change. Therefore, measures to reduce costs and increase efficiency such as layoffs have come out. After Meta announced 10,000 layoffs in March, the stock price rose to its highest level in eight months.

However, reducing costs and increasing efficiency alone cannot tell a bigger story, and capital cannot give more support. Meta must use a broad and long track that more people recognize to inject a shot in the arm for performance and capital.

At this time, ChatGPT's global craze intensified. Microsoft, which is regarded as falling behind in the Internet era, has regained its vitality in the AI era with its investment in OpenAI. Even Google, which is a leader on the AI track, has been preempted by the limelight.

Meta on the side is estimated to want to rub a wave of heat, so Zugerberg drew a pie for the outside world again, saying that he would give the largest investment to AI.

However, how much advantage does Meta occupy on this track and how competitive does it have?

03 How competitive is Meta?

On the AI track, Meta's entry into the game is actually not late.

As early as 2013, Zuckerberg proposed to make Meta a leader in the field of AI. Meta has spent billions of dollars building AI for nearly a decade, and Zuckerberg has personally recruited top AI scholars like Yann LeCun. It can be said that in the AI layout, Meta does not lack funds, nor talents, and its strength is good.

For a long time, Meta has used the AI technology developed to accurately deliver advertisements, intelligent distribution of content, identify misinformation, etc., providing a strong engine for its own commercialization.

However, the ability to identify misinformation has taken a toll last year. Before ChatGPT became popular last year, Meta launched an AI chatbot called "Galactica." However, Galactica, like most chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard, has difficulty identifying misinformation. When users asked it who was running Silicon Valley, Galactica replied: Steve Jobs.

Due to public pressure, Galactica disappeared without a trace after only three days of release.

Some insiders believe that Meta has indeed suffered unfair treatment - people always tend to demand high standards from large technology companies, but let small startups such as OpenAI successfully break through the cracks of the giants.

Ten thousand layoffs turned around and embraced AI, and Meta was going to change its name again

Source: GlobalTechOutlook

Galactica's ordeal hasn't dampened Meta's enthusiasm for AI. Last month, Zuckerberg again briefed the outside world on the unfolding of generative AI. He said Meta has brought all of its generative AI teams together into a single group focused on building technology into Meta's products to create better experiences.

These experiences include text experiences, such as chats in WhatsApp and Messenger; Image experiences, such as creative filters in Instagram. In other words, AI tools can help users express themselves better while discovering more fresh and interesting content.

Alternatively, for businesses, AI tools can be used to create ads on Facebook. AI tools can also help engineers write better code faster, helping companies reduce costs and increase efficiency.

But Zuckerberg acknowledges that there is still a long way to go to achieve these long-term goals.

Whether it can be achieved or not, what is valuable is that Zuckerberg finally realized that AI technology should be used to improve user experience, which is the key to Meta's decline and falling behind, and the key to capital's willingness to pay for its AI story.

Don't always think about using AI to improve commercialization and make a few taels of silver, this is extremely short-sighted. It is forward-looking vision to truly use technology to master the right to speak and lead in user experience.

The recent SAM has allowed the outside world to see that Meta has the technical strength of Google and Microsoft in AI. The key is whether Meta can truly achieve a balance between technology development and commercialization and achieve true sustainability.

The one who laughs last is the king.

Author | Eric Edit | Image of Zuri by The New York TImes

Reference source:

Lost in the most recent Meta layoffs? The company’s shift to AI(FastCompany)

Meta is pushing the metaverse aside for AI(FinanceYahoo)

What metaverse? Meta says its single largest investment is now in ‘advancing AI’(CNN)

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