Mark Zuckerberg shared more details about the company’s plans to monetize its generative AI Assistant. Zuckerberg stated that Meta AI would one day be able to show product recommendations and ads during the company’s earnings call for its first quarter. He also hinted that a subscription component would be available for those who wanted a “premium version” of the assistant.
Zuckerberg said, “I believe that there will be an opportunity to show product suggestions or ads, as as well as a subscription service for people who wish to unlock more computation for additional functionality or Intelligence.”
Zuckerberg added that the company is currently focused on increasing Meta AI’s use. He announced yesterday that Meta AI had reached “almost 1 billion” monthly users. “I expect we’ll be largely focused for the next year on scaling and deepening the engagement before we’ll be really ready to start building the business here,” said Zuckerberg.
The comments of Zuckerberg, just one day after Meta launched its standalone AI app, underscore how important the assistant is for the company. The Facebook founder has said that he wants Meta AI AI to be the world’s most popular AI assistant. He said on the call Wednesday that a standalone application would be especially important for attracting US customers.
Meta’s strategy for monetizing its assistant is similar to its approach with Threads. The latter only began extending their early experiments with advertisements this month, long after it had reached hundreds of millions users. Zuckerberg shared some new milestones regarding Threads. He said that the text-based app has now reached 350 million monthly users and that the time spent on the platform increased by 35 percent in the last six month due to improvements made to the company’s recommendation systems.
Susan Li, Meta’s CFO, shared in the call that the company had also been testing the Llama model for Threads’ recommendations. The addition of the large-language model has led to a 4% increase in time spent. “It’s still early, but we will be focusing on how to deploy this for other types of content, including photos and video,” she said.
