The depth of Meta’s determination to win the AI race against other digital platforms is demonstrated by the hundreds of millions it is throwing at hiring the best minds.
Several reports say one person was offered, and refused, a $1 billion package, and others are fielding $250 million enticements to come over to Meta.
Meta is assembling what it calls an elite, talent-dense team to build its AI superintelligence and the first beneficiary is advertising.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is putting billions into his Meta Superintelligence Lab and attracting top talent by not only dangling top dollars but also the best tools.
“I've spent a lot of time building this team this (June) quarter, and the reason that so many people are excited to join is because Meta has all the ingredients required to build leading models and deliver them to billions of people,” he told analysts during a briefing on June quarter results.
“The people who are joining us will have access to unparalleled compute as we build out several multi-GW (multi-gigawatt datacentre) clusters.
“We're making all these investments because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do.”
From a business perspective, Meta is pursuing five opportunities: improved advertising, more engaging experiences, business messaging, Meta AI and AI devices.
“On advertising, the strong performance this quarter is largely thanks to AI unlocking greater efficiency and gains across our ads system,” Zuckerberg told analysts.
“This quarter, we expanded our new AI-powered recommendation model for ads to new surfaces and improved its performance by using more signals and a longer context.”
This has driven about 5% more ad conversions on Instagram and 3% on Facebook.
Meta is also seeing good progress with AI for ad creative. Zuckerberg says a “meaningful percent” of ad revenue now comes from campaigns using Generative AI features.
“This is going to be especially valuable for smaller advertisers with limited budgets, while agencies will continue the important work to help larger brands apply these tools strategically,” he said.
AI is also “significantly” improving the ability to show people content that they’re going to find interesting and useful.
Advancements in Meta’s recommendation systems have improved quality so much that it has led to a 5% increase in time spent on Facebook and 6% on Instagram in the June quarter.
“There's a lot of potential for content itself to get better too,” said Zuckerberg.
“We're seeing early progress with the launch of our AI video editing tools across Meta AI and our new Edits app, and there's a lot more to do here.”
Another opportunity is business messaging. “I believe every business will soon have a business AI just like they have an email address, social media account, and website,” he said.
“We're starting to see some product market fit in a number of countries where we're testing these agents, and we're integrating these business AIs into ads on Facebook and Instagram, as well as directly into e-commerce websites.”
Meta AI has more than a billion monthly active users.
“Our focus is now deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI. As we continue improving our models we see engagement grow, so our next generation of models is going to continue to really help here," he said
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