META is a “careful advertising” of its AI assistant and also a “premium” version.
One day after Meta launched its standalone AI app, Mark Zuckerberg shared more information on how the company ultimately plans to monetize it to generate AI assistants. Zuckerberg said Meta AI could one day show ads and product advice during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. He also hints at plans for subscription components that want a more “advanced” version of the Assistant version.
“I think there will be a great opportunity to showcase product suggestions or ads, as well as advanced services for people who want to unlock more computing other features or intelligence,” Zuckerberg said.
He added that at present, the company is more focused on increasing the use of meta-AI. (He announced yesterday that Meta AI hit nearly 1 billion users per month.) “I hope we will focus on expanding and deepening engagement to a large extent, and at least next year we will be really ready to start building our business here,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s comment (a day after Meta introduced its standalone AI app, highlighting the importance of assistants to the company. Facebook founder repeatedly said he wanted Meta AI to become the world’s most used AI assistant, and he said on Wednesday’s call that standalone apps are particularly important in attracting U.S. users.
Meta’s strategy to monetize assistants in many ways reflects its threaded approach, which began early experiments on advertising only after attracting hundreds of millions of users this month. Speaking of threading, Zuckerberg also shared some new milestones for threading, saying text-based applications now have 350 million monthly active users and that the time spent on the platform has increased by 35% over the past six months due to improvements in the company’s suggested system.
Later in the call, Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li shared that the company is also testing its Llama model for recommendations for power threads, and the addition of large language models has resulted in a 4% increase in time spent. “It’s still here early, but this year will focus on exploring how we deploy it for other content types, including photos and videos,” she said.
