By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 25th, 2024
Meta intends to commercialize the Llama 2, its large language model (LLM), as it focuses on the metaverse as the bigger picture amid mainstream adoption of generative AI technologies.
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) has undeniably enjoyed a profitable YTD with a strong interaction recorded in its family of applications. According to the company’s recent quarterly earnings report, its daily active users are about 2.06 billion and its monthly active users stand at around 3.03 billion. With a revenue of around $32 billion, the company highlighted that the products in the pipeline including Llama 2, Threads, Reels, and AI products will significantly boost its revenue in the coming quarters once the adoption peaks.
Moreover, competition in the generative AI products and social media platforms is significantly higher than in pre-COVID amid the entrance of more venture capital in the industry.
For instance, Meta’s family of social media apps is facing notable competition from the Elon Musk-backed X platform that intends to become a major global social and financial ecosystem. Additionally, Meta’s generative AI products are facing notable competition from OpenAI-backed ChatGPT-4, and Google’s PaLM 2 which powers the Bard AI technology.
Meanwhile, Meta’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said during the second quarter earnings call the shareholders should not expect significant revenue generation from the Llama 2 among other new projects. Nonetheless, Zuckerberg noted that the company’s revenue is likely to grow in the fiscal year 2024 fueled by the high demand and growth of its data center and AI-related products.
Meta and AI Developments
In a bid to ensure fast development with notable on-birding of new talents, Meta opted to tap on third-party developers to improve on its Llama 2 and other AI-related services. According to Cai GoGwilt, the chief architect at Ironclad, the open-source community worked on the first version of Llama to make it faster and make it run on a mobile phone. As a result, GoGwilt highlighted that his company is watching to see how AI-focused developers build the Llama 2 technology.
“Part of the reason we’re not immediately using it is because the bigger interest for us is what the open-source community is going to do with it,” GoGwilt noted.
During this year’s Meta Connect event held at the company’s headquarters on September 27, Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, highlighted the importance of Llama 2 being an open-source software in line with the company’s core vision of venturing into the metaverse industry.
Amid the heightened AI capabilities, Meta’s stock market has grown 166 percent YTD to trade around $321.49 on Tuesday. The $809.75 billion company is expected to play a crucial role in the AI industry as its family of applications experiences notable adoption around the world.