Zuckerberg says new Meta team to work on 'AI personas,' other features

The group's short-term focus will be 'creative and expressive tools'

Mark Zuckerberg announced a new team will be formed at Meta Platforms whose work is supposed to bring generative artificial intelligence-based features.

The CEO of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s corporate parent revealed the creation of the new generative AI-focused "top-level product group" in a Facebook post Monday. 

"In the short term, we’ll focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways," Zuckerberg wrote about the team.

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The corporate parent of Facebook is "exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats) and with video and multi-modal experiences," he added.

Meta Headquarters

Meta corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Nov. 9, 2022.  (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

By bringing together "a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company," the new "top-level product group" will take shape, Zuckerberg said.

Generative AI utilizes algorithms for creating text, images and other content. The area of AI has been making headlines recently due to ChatGPT, a chatbot made by OpenAI and backed by Microsoft, garnering attention. 

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook, speaks via video at SXSW in Austin in March 2022

Mark Zuckerberg, via video, speaks at the 2022 SXSW Conference and Festivals at the Austin Convention Center March 15, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (Samantha Burkardt/Getty Images for SXSW / Getty Images)

By creating the new team, Meta aims to boost its efforts in generative AI, according to Zuckerberg’s post.

The CEO said the company has "a lot of foundational work to do before getting into the really futuristic experiences." He also expressed excitement about what he anticipates Meta will create in the process. 

Meta's app icons on a smartphone

In this July 28, 2022, photo illustration, the app icons of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR are displayed on a smartphone screen with a Meta logo in the background.  (Onur Dogman/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images / Getty Images)

In recent weeks, there have been developments in connection to AI-powered services at other tech companies such as Google and Microsoft.

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Google has introduced experimental conversational AI service Bard, plus new AI-powered features for its Search, Maps and Lens apps. 

Microsoft introduced AI upgrades to its Bing search engine and Edge web browser.

Certain Spotify users are starting to get the AI DJ that the audio streaming service announced last week. 

At the beginning of the month, Zuckerberg described AI as one of the "two major technological waves" driving the company’s roadmap during Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

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"AI is the foundation of our discovery engine and our ads business, and we also think it’s going to enable many new products and additional transformations within our apps," he told investors and analysts on the call. "Generative AI is an extremely exciting new area with so many different applications, and one of our goals for Meta is to build on our research to become a leader in generative AI in addition to our leading work in recommendation AI."

Joe Toppe contributed to this report.