What exactly is happening to global IT companies?
Meta, a major social media company that operates Facebook and Instagram, is facing headwinds. The Metaverse business, which the company has focused on even by changing its company name, is incurring a loss of over 1 trillion yen in 2022, and there is no sign that it will produce any results at this point.
In March of this year, the company also announced its withdrawal from the NFT business, which it had been focusing on in recent years. The company has also announced that it will cut an additional 10,000 people in the coming months, following the 11,000 job cuts it implemented in November last year. The company has approximately 87,000 employees as of September 2022. The company will lay off 25% of its employees in just six months.
Meta's business performance in 2021 could be described as excellent as demand for online advertising increased due to the coronavirus pandemic. In response, the company has been actively promoting capital investment and securing human resources.
However, from 2022 onwards, Meta's performance has declined due to factors such as "rising interest rates, geopolitical instability, and tightening regulations."
Under such circumstances, AI is a new area that Meta is focusing on.
Competition in AI technology has intensified rapidly in recent months, with companies such as Google and Microsoft making it clear that they are focusing on AI-related technologies, and Meta is said to be entering the market.
"To accelerate our work in this space, we are creating a new top-level product group focused on generative AI," CEO Zuckerberg said in February.
On February 24th, they released a new large-scale language model, LLaMA. However, LLaMA was released exclusively for researchers and is not currently available to general users.
While large-scale AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are being released one after another, there is an undeniable impression that the company is a little behind the curve.
The difference from other companies is that Meta continues to focus on the Metaverse business, and we can expect synergies between Metaverse and AI.
For example, if we use AI that can communicate with the same accuracy as humans, we can create human-like AI characters in the Metaverse. The key to the future will likely be whether Meta can find ways to utilize AI that only Meta can do.
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