Longtime AI leader Meta tries not to be left out

Meta, however, has been crippled, in part, by its reputation as a corporate giant that helps spread untruths, Dr. LeCun said last month. And with responsibilities to billions of users, he couldn’t afford to leave a chatbot online that can generate false and biased information.

“OpenAI and other smaller companies are in a better position to get some credit for releasing this stuff,” said Chirag Shah, a University of Washington professor who has explored flaws in technologies such as Galactica and ChatGPT. “They won’t have the same kind of backfire.”

In recent years, Meta has also focused on another area of ​​technology: the immersive online world of the so-called Metaverse, which Zuckerberg said he believes is the next big thing. In the short term, it’s unclear how the company can deliver generative AI products with its existing services in a way that really captures the public’s attention.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t try. Meta is accelerating its efforts to get AI-powered products into the hands of customers, said Irina Kofman, senior director of product management for generative AI who oversees XAI, a new team that aims to help create AI products across the enterprise. Mr. Zuckerberg is directly involved in driving the initiatives, hosting weekly meetings with product leaders and top AI researchers, she said.

During a call last week with investors, Zuckerberg repeatedly mentioned AI. He called it “the foundation of our discovery engine and advertising business” and added that it would “enable many new products and additional transformations within our apps.”

Some Meta executives have spoken of the generative AI boom with a distinct air of sour grapes. In his online chat last month, Dr. LeCun described ChatGPT as “not particularly innovative” and “nothing revolutionary” because it relied on technologies developed and deployed by Meta, Google and other companies.

Earlier last year, Meta released a chatbot, BlenderBot, which extended the state of the art, Dr. LeCun said. But that never caught on, he said, because the company had worked hard to ensure it wouldn’t produce offensive material.