Meta launches suite of generative AI music tools rivaling Googles MusicLM

This event could lead to the development of new AI products that may eventually be introduced to Meta’s users. Meta famously rebranded back in 2021 to reflect a new focus on metaverse-related products, but since that time the general fervor for the metaverse has died down, as have Meta’s announcements in that arena. The company is still very much focused on this tech though, according to Nicola Mendelson, VP of the Global Business Group at Meta. “Our general approach here with our ad platform is that we want to help provide tools that improve performance for advertisers, because when advertisers see better performance, they’re going to choose to spend more on our platform,” said Hegeman. Meta’s latest suite of generative AI tools allows users to input text to create musical and audio compositions, rivaling a similar tool released this year by Google. The first feature enables brands to generate variations of the same copy with customization capabilities for their advertisements.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms on Thursday gave employees a sneak peek at a series of artificial intelligence tools it is building, including chatbots ChatGPT-like chatbots planned for Messenger and WhatsApp that could converse using different personas. Taking recent trends into consideration, the demand for AI chatbots has skyrocketed. For example, Character.AI, a leading AI-chatbot app developed by researchers who previously helped build LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at Google, reported over 1.7 million new installs in less than a week on the market. The company is backed by $150 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). However, Character.AI faces competition from a plethora of chatbot apps available on the App Store, offering similar functionality for users to develop their AI characters, such as Replika or personal assistants that assist with writing. Furthermore, Meta announced plans to host an internal AI hackathon in July, focusing on generative AI.

Bringing People Together to Inform Decision-Making on Generative AI

Anant is a Computer science engineer currently working as a data scientist with experience in Finance and AI products as a service. He is keen to build AI-powered solutions that create better data points and solve daily life problems in an impactful and efficient way. The announcement created a positive outlook for Meta, as it has posted year-on-year revenue growth for the first time in three quarters. This positive momentum further strengthens the company’s position as a leader in the tech industry and enhances its vision to deliver innovative solutions for advertisers. Meta also recently launched Threads, a Twitter clone that is seeing rapid user growth, outpacing that achieved by OpenAI after the launch of ChatGPT.

Token-based autoregressive models, on the other hand, are well known to likewise yield great results, with superior global picture coherence in particular, but they are significantly more expensive to train and employ for inference. TOKYO — Facebook owner Meta intends to commercialize its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December, joining Google in finding practical applications for the tech. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told employees at the session on Thursday that advancements in generative AI in the last year had now made it possible for the company to build the technology “into every single one of our products.” The form doesn’t account for a user’s activity on Meta-owned properties, whether it’s Facebook comments or Instagram photos, so it’s possible the company could potentially use such first-party data to train its generative AI models. In addition, Meta said in the meeting it was experimenting with AI that would allow users to engage with a text prompt in order to modify their own photos for sharing in Instagram Stories. This also comes on the heels of significant consumer interest in AI photo editors, including the viral trend of AI avatars that kicked off last year, sending apps like Lensa AI to the top of the App Store.

Google Research Introduces MediaPipe FaceStylizer: An Efficient Design for Few-Shot Face Stylization

Apps that turn words into AI photos, like Wonder, are also popular across the App Store. The news follows Zuckerberg’s statements during Meta’s Q1 earnings that it was exploring how to put new AI technologies to use in products that reach billions of users worldwide. In late 2021 the company formerly known as Facebook rebranded itself as Meta and declared that its future lay in the metaverse. The precise meaning of this term has been much-debated, but it usually refers to a “next generation” iteration of the internet featuring more immersive environments possibly rendered in virtual reality (VR), avatars, and a shared online experience. “We think MusicGen can turn into a new type of instrument — just like synthesizers when they first appeared,” the company said in a blog. Meta acknowledged the difficulty in creating AI models capable of making music since audio often contains millions of points where the model does an action compared to written text models like Llama 2, which contain only thousands.

The promise of Meta’s generative AI features is that companies will be able to generate variants more quickly based on a single example. It will be interesting to see if the generated variants regularly outperform the original human-created options. You should expect Meta’s models in AI Sandbox to be fine-tuned on known successful ad copy and images that drive higher click-through rates.

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Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Lex Fridman had Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, on his podcast to discuss the future of AI at the company and for the world. AI Sandbox is currently being tried out by a “pretty small” number of advertisers, including the direct-to-consumer cosmetics brand Jones Road Beauty, which was present at the event. Writing for InfoQ has opened many doors and increased career opportunities for me. I was able to deeply engage with experts and thought leaders to learn more about the topics I covered.

During the call, Meta also highlighted that despite the $1 billion annual revenue rate, Reels are not generating enough money. An unmissable weekly round up of the biggest stories in emerging tech from Yakov Livshits an Asian perspective, featuring commentary from Forkast Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Microsoft is now selling parts for its Xbox controllers, including input circuit boards, top cases, and buttons.

Meta is working on AI models that will rival OpenAI’s GPT-4

But the technology is already seeping into ad products, as marketers rely on machines to slightly adjust ad creative and copy. While metaverse creation is on the company’s long-term plan, generating more ad revenue is probably the need of the hour. After Apple implemented its App Tracking Transparency feature in 2021, Meta was affected badly. Early last year, the social media company said that this change would cost them $10 billion in 2022.

• It’s also a nascent and unknown technology that could be used for deepfakes and lead to unforeseen consequences in culture.
• Meta’s own metaverse platform, Horizons, is built around creativity and in particular, has been designed to allow users to build their own homes and environments within the VR environment.
• A Meta spokesperson said that the company’s newest Llama 2 open-source large language model “wasn’t trained on Meta user data, and we have not launched any Generative AI consumer features on our systems yet.”
• “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.”

Google, for one, sees a threat to its search dominance after Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI and started to incorporate the AI into its consumer products, like Teams and Bing. The features enable businesses to use video creative in catalog ads, compare existing manual sales campaigns to Advantage Plus shopping campaigns and improve performance with a targeted audience. Notably, the AppMaster no-code platform offers an impressive suite of tools for creating web, mobile, and backend applications. It may well prove to be a valuable resource for companies like Meta looking to quickly and cost-effectively leverage AI and other advanced technologies. Meta’s focus seems to be pivoting strongly towards AI across all its apps even though it has claimed to be also heavily focused on its metaverse projects.

The company announced CM3leon (pronounced “chameleon”) in a blog post as it simultaneously published a white paper about the tool’s technological developments. Imagine a professional musician being able to explore new compositions without having to play a single note on an instrument. Or a small business owner adding a soundtrack to their latest video ad on Instagram with ease.

During the meeting, Zuckerberg shared more about these projects in a joint presentation with Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of Engineering, Generative AI at Meta. It’s likely that they are hoping that this democratizing effect will be the catalyst for more of its billion-plus customer base to make the leap from the two-dimensional pages of Facebook to the three-dimensional worlds of Horizons. Language-based generative AI applications such as the chat functions mentioned above are likely to eventually be powered by LLaMA – Large Language Model Meta AI – Meta’s own answer to ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

As The Verge notes, this appears to be more fruit from Microsoft’s repairability agreement a couple years back with shareholder advocacy group As You Sow—and it’s part of a wider industry exploration of the concept. —Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, responds to a legal threat from Twitter/X over the NGO’s highlighting of hate speech on the platform. Given that European courts and regulators have shut down Meta’s ability to legally track people’s activities across multiple services and websites without express user consent, any new method of targeting advertising would prove very welcome at 1 Hacker Way.