Meta’s two long-term bets on technologies of the future - AI and the metaverse

Brink · Dec 18, 2023

Takeaways

Meta’s two long-term bets on technologies of the future — AI and the metaverse — each took major steps forward in 2023. And more importantly, they began to intersect.

The progress we made in 2023 means generative AI is making its way into the heart of the world’s most popular apps, mixed reality is now at the core of a mass market headset, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will let AI see the world from our perspective for the first time.

We believe one of the most powerful manifestations of cutting edge AI will be assistants like Meta AI that can understand the world around you and help you throughout your day, eventually without needing to be prompted.

Bill Gates once said people “overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.” Individual breakthroughs tend to accumulate in a non-linear way until suddenly, the future comes into focus. As the old saying goes, it happens two ways: gradually and then suddenly. And as we close out a wild 12 months of technological progress, I think it’s fair to say that 2023 has been a “suddenly” kind of year.

Last month we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of FAIR, our Fundamental AI Research lab. When we launched it in 2013 there was tremendous excitement across the industry about the role AI would play in the future, and early machine learning applications were already playing a central role across Facebook. Few could have imagined back then just how impressive the progress would be. In fact, even just two years ago many might have questioned it.

As we look ahead to 2024, another big milestone is coming up: it will be 10 years since Meta began working on the computing platform of the future at Reality Labs. These two emerging technologies — AI and the metaverse—represent Meta’s biggest long-term bets on the future. And in 2023 we began to see these two technological pathways intersect in the form of products accessible to huge numbers of people.