During a meeting with employees at Meta’s headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the company’s involvement in the artificial intelligence (AI) race. The gathering, held at the Hacker Square pavilion, marked the first event in the space since before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Zuckerberg acknowledged Meta’s recent layoffs but mainly focused on the company’s advancements in generative AI, a field that utilizes written prompts to generate conversational text and compelling visuals. He highlighted the breakthroughs Meta has witnessed in generative AI over the past year and expressed the company’s intention to incorporate the technology into all its products, aiming to bring these capabilities to billions of users in unique ways.

While Meta has previously invested in AI, other companies such as OpenAI (backed by Microsoft), Google, and Microsoft they have dominated the conversation around the latest consumer applications of AI. However, during the meeting, Zuckerberg and other Meta executives discussed the integration of generative AI models into the metaverse—a virtual world that Meta is heavily investing in. They particularly emphasized how AI can contribute to creating 3D visuals for the metaverse.

To foster AI innovation within the company, Meta is providing employees with access to internal generative AI tools and organizing a hackathon for showcasing AI projects. Meta also has plans to introduce a service on Instagram that allows users to modify photos through text prompts and share them in the app’s Stories feature. Moreover, the company intends to enhance its Messenger and WhatsApp services with more sophisticated AI-powered chatbots for entertainment purposes.

While Meta remains committed to sharing AI research with the open-source community, the executives did not address concerns raised by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley regarding a public leak of Meta’s LLaMA language model and the potential for misuse.

In recent news, Meta informed employees that they will be required to work at the company’s offices for three days a week starting in September, aligning with similar policy changes made by Amazon and Google in recent months.