Since then, will Facebook's AI research be linked to revenue? On Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of meta, announced that he would leave this year, which Zuckerberg called "the end of an era". Yesterday, the company lost another senior executive in the restructuring of its artificial intelligence department.
On June 2, meta released a major announcement on AI strategic transformation, announcing the implementation of "decentralized organizational structure". Jerome pesenti, who has served as the vice president of meta (Facebook) artificial intelligence for the past four years, will leave later this month because the company will integrate his artificial intelligence team more closely into various product groups instead of regarding the artificial intelligence research institution as a specific organization.
From the content seen on Facebook and instagram timelines to the software supporting oculus VR earphones, AI has been used in everything in the meta product line. Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of meta, said in the announcement of restructuring that this change aims to "make large-scale use of the latest artificial intelligence technologies".
Meta said in the announcement that Jerome pesenti has made a transformation plan in the past few months because he hopes to deeply integrate technology into production. In the new situation, the power of AI research sequence is assigned to meta's product group. It must support the technology of existing systems and promote the development of artificial intelligence technology.
"We believe that this will accelerate the adoption of important new technologies throughout the company and enable meta to make continuous progress. These teams responsible for introducing AI progress and best practices into supporting products are called" Ai innovation centers, "Andrew Bosworth wrote.
Some organizational structure adjustments of meta AI research system include:
Responsible AI organizations will join the social impact team.
AI product teams committed to protecting meta platform users, improving recommendation system and content relevance, and improving advertising and business services will be transferred to product engineering teams.
Ai4ar team will join the XR team of reality labs.
The AI research team led by Yann Lecun, vice president and chief scientist of meta AI and Turing Award winner, will be incorporated into Bosworth's reality labs to further integrate into the ar/vr department with more than 17000 employees.
Meta hopes to use AI technology to realize the vision of the meta universe. In the short term, meta aims to compete with byte hopping, which has popularized a new way to use artificial intelligence to recommend content.
Yann Lecun: This is a major shift
Yann Lecun has always been the leader of artificial intelligence research on Facebook. After the announcement, he further explained the setting of meta research institutions: "the working mode and mission of fair remain unchanged. Fair is now a part of reality Labs - Research (RLR) under the leadership of Michael abrash. RLR is a research organization with a wide range and now includes artificial intelligence."
Fair is still managed by Joelle Pineau and Antoine borders. Lecun will co lead fair with them. The former two are responsible for managing the actual work, while Lecun will help develop strategies. Fair now stands for "basic artificial intelligence research".
"Artificial intelligence has become the core of meta operation, and the meta artificial intelligence technology team engaged in product oriented projects will now become a part of the corresponding product group," Lecun said. "Many of the technological achievements originally developed in fair have been transformed into deployable technologies by the application R & D teams in meta AI. These teams are being transferred to the product department."
All for the meta universe
Last October, after Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was renamed meta, meta seemed to focus all its work on building a "meta universe".
Meta first introduced a meta universe tactile glove, which was questioned as plagiarism. At the end of last year, meta launched the first virtual world platform horizon worlds, which supports 20 people online at the same time, but was roast that it is a low configuration version of "my world". Some time ago, meta disclosed some details of the upcoming "project Cambria" high-end headset, and Zuckerberg personally put on this headset to demonstrate
It can be said that Zuckerberg is leading the meta all in metauniverse. He said that meta is studying a new generation AI model, which allows people to describe a world, and artificial intelligence can automatically generate all aspects of the world.
After the name change, meta recruited a large number of employees for reality labs. Last year, it added more than 13000 employees, while in the first quarter of this year alone, it added nearly 6000 employees. Now, the famous fair has become a part of reality labs.
The practice of decentralized organization has also raised concerns about the future of meta AI research, and even the whole AI field. According to Reuters, due to the impact of inflation and reduced consumer demand, the number of layoffs in the US technology industry in May this year exceeded nine times that in the first four months of this year, reaching 4044. This is the highest monthly total since december2020.
Will meta's actions lead the new trend of AI Lab transformation in large factories? We don't know yet.