Zuckerberg Credits AI-Driven Reels for 24% Increase in Time Spent on Instagram

Meta’s shares hit a new high due to the company’s rebound in revenue growth, partially driven by its advancements in AI technology. The social media giant reported its first revenue increase in three quarters, attributing the success to the further integration of AI technology. 

Instagram and Facebook’s Reels monetization quarterly grew by over 30% and 40%, respectively, as AI played a significant role on the platforms. Since the launch of Reels, Zuckerberg noted that AI recommendations have led to a more than 24% increase in time spent on Instagram. The popularity of Reels continues to grow, with users sharing Reels over 2 billion times daily, doubling over the past six months.

Zuckerberg highlighted two major technological waves that are driving the company’s plans: the current AI wave and the upcoming metaverse wave. Meanwhile, Meta’s AI initiatives are concentrated in two key areas. The first is a robust recommendation and ranking infrastructure that serves as the backbone of their products, including feeds, Reels, ads system, and integrity systems. The CEO noted that the company had spent years perfecting this technology. The second area involves new generative foundation models that are making it possible to create innovative products and experiences that were previously unimaginable. Generative foundation models are a type of AI technology that enable the creation of new, innovative products and experiences by generating new content from existing data. 

“Beyond recommendations, the other major focus of our AI work is foundation models to enable a lot of new use cases, including generative AI,”

he wrote.

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta has caught up in building an AI infrastructure and is no longer lagging behind. He stated that the company’s focus now shifts to exploring innovative ways of integrating and optimizing the technology.

Meta said it has an open approach to AI, with its many state-of-the-art models open-sourced for experimentation and building. The company released the LLaMa LLM to researchers this quarter, which has 65 billion parameters and outperforms larger models.

Meta invested heavily in AI infrastructure and capital expenditure in recent years and remains committed to both AI and the metaverse. Meta’s AR glasses will feature an AI-centric operating system that will be key to the future of computing. Metaverse technologies will also aid in delivering AI, with avatars developed over the last few years serving as a foundation for embodying AI agents.

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