Meta plans to commercialise generative AI for ads by year-end

Facebook parent company Meta has said that it would be commercialising its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December. In an interview with Nikkei Asia, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said that Meta’s AI can help advertisers by suggesting the tools to build their advertisements and improve their effectiveness. For instance, creating different images in an advertisement to suit different audiences.

To be sure, Meta’s head Mark Zuckerberg announced in February that the company is creating a new ‘top-level product group’ to ‘turbocharge’ its work in the generative AI space. At that time, Zuckerberg said that Meta teams that are working on the technology will be streamlined to make a single group. 

Bosworth’s statement indicates a timeline for the commercialisation of such products and tools. He told the publication that Meta has a large research organisation with hundreds of employees, adding that he feels confident that Meta is at the forefront in this space.

Advertisement is a major revenue stream for Meta. Company-owned photo-sharing app Instagram announced last month that it is testing ads in search results to cater to users searching for businesses, products, and content. The feature is currently in the initial testing phase and is expected to be launched globally in the coming months. In Q2 2022, Meta announced that its quarterly revenue has declined amid dwindling ad sales. Since then, the company has increased ad avenues on Instagram and Facebook.

Notably, last month, Microsoft announced that it is bringing advertisements to its Bing AI search engine. GPT-4 forms the base model for Bing AI and ChatGPT Plus. “First, we want to drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search. It is a top goal for us, and we measure success in part by how much traffic we are sending from the new Bing/Edge,” Microsoft’s corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi said.