Meta Cuts VR to Build Faster AI Support Tools

0:00Meta is saving money in some areas, cutting costs, and consolidating all thanks to AI, or maybe because of AI. We're going to get into it on the podcast. They're centralizing their ad support using AI support assistance. They're cutting 30 % of the costs for their metaverse. There's a lot going on. We're going to dive into all of that on the show today. Before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to try any of the models I talk about on the show, including, of course, everything from Meta, their latest llama models, go check out my startup AI box dot AI. you can get access to all of the latest AI models from Gemini to Anthropic to OpenAI to Mistral.

0:41You can compare them side by side in our playground and it's a really great way to see what models are best at answering your questions and helping you solve your problems. So I'll leave a link in the description. It's 20 bucks a month so you don't have to have subscriptions to 100 different platforms. You can get it all at AIbox.ai. All right let's get into what's going on with Facebook and Meta. So the first piece of news that I was kind of interested in was how Meta is currently making this kind of centralized approach for Instagram and Facebook support. They're also testing using AI support assistance.

1:13The reason why I think this is great is if anyone has ever had an issue with their Instagram account or with Meta with Facebook and tried to talk to the customer support, you know it is basically non-existent. It is insanely frustrating to try to get through to anyone there from my personal experience. And so, well, a lot of times people that I have talked to are like, oh my gosh, I would hate to have an AI support assistant or customer support assistant done by AI to, you know, to work at an organization. I only want to talk to a human. Humans cost a lot of money and there's like a lot of limitations.

1:45You got to wait in line and yada yada. It's just not super feasible. But with the rise of AI support assistants, while I know a lot of people maybe don't like them because like, oh, it's not as good or smart as talking to a human, if you could get 90 % more cases solved or help people with problems, I think it's an incredible use case. And I am all on board in supporting that as kind of where a lot of customer support goes. Essentially, you can support a lot more use cases or issues that people may have that we're not currently able to do. So right now, Meta is launching a new centralized support hub.

2:19And something interesting to me is that they said, like they essentially admitted that their prior support options haven't always quote met expectations so yes they have not always met expectations within their new hub you're going to be able to see tools to report an account issue to recover an account that you've lost access to you can get answers via ai powered search and also their ai assistant and all of these features are going to be rolling out to global users on facebook and instagram both on ios and android so what's cool with these AI systems is they literally just roll out to everybody.

2:51Again, I also think this is going to be great for meta, kind of with their meta AI, because it's going to increase adoption usage a ton, because like, this is something that people actively want. There's billions of users using their platform. And now they can make it so that you know, all of their customer support is done with their AI tool. And right there, I think they'd have a positive ROI based off of that. So the new ai assistant that's being tested is they're specifically designing it to make it a little bit more personalized with the help it gives when it comes to account recovery or managing your profile or updating your settings i think it's going to be first available to facebook and then they're going to roll it out to other apps like instagram in the future and whatsapp you can imagine as well would get added into there right now they said that their use of this ai system is to help protect users' accounts.

3:38They said that account hacks have decreased by over 30 % globally on both Facebook and Instagram. They said AI is used to help identify and stop other threats. So when we talk about like phishing or suspicious logins or compromised accounts, this is some of the things that Meta is really focusing on, putting a big focus on when it comes to using their AI to kind of help with security. Meta also said that AI has helped to avoid disabling accounts by mistake, which is something that happens and is quite frustrating. They said that they are speeding up the appeals process. So if your account accidentally got flagged, but there was nothing actually wrong that you were doing, the AI can go and detect and help you get that resolved.

4:20Something that's interesting to me is a lot of people are like, oh, awesome. You know, Meta is trying to like do good and help with customer support and be this like super useful company. I think the funny thing is I feel like this is more out of necessity than out of them trying to be helpful or making their tools better. There's an entire Reddit forum that was set up earlier this year to help people who are suing Meta because their accounts got disabled and they refused to enable them. And, you know, it's affecting their livelihoods and businesses or other things. And I think Meta is probably trying to approach that.

4:53Meta says that this new hub is going to address those types of problems. it's going to centralize account recovery and all that kind of stuff it will also send out sms and email alerts about risky activity so i think this is definitely not you know it's like obviously something that meta is doing to improve the quality but i think it's out of necessity it's out of because of lawsuits it's kind of where it feels like a lot of these big software companies their innovation comes from uh you know trying to get out of paying fines or penalties more than trying to make useful tools. But I mean, I guess I'm speculating on the reason regardless.

5:27I do think it is going to be great for users. Over the years, Meta has regularly relocated a lot of its key areas like their account settings, their data management tools, their privacy features. Apparently, it's to make things easier for users. But I think changing a lot also means that it's really hard to remember where you find things in the app. This is something I find it's not just Meta. Like I like to roast Meta on this show. But I think this is a problem that we see across a lot of different software companies with the UI. And so I actually do appreciate I've recently used multiple services, like if I'm trying to unsubscribe from a service, and I can't figure out where that is inside of their app inside of the settings, I will just ask their AI chat, and it will give me a link I click to and that will take me to wherever I need to go and unsubscribe.

6:07So it's like I'm essentially using these AI chats now to navigate different tools and softwares and platforms to figure out how to use them because their UI isn't intuitive enough. So on the one hand, I think they're trying to save money and, you know, save themselves from lawsuits over there. There's another way that Meta is currently saving money. And that is because they are reportedly planning to cut their metaverse budget by 30%. So it seems like multiple places they're saving, consolidating, and evidently they're going to take all this money that they're saving from a bunch of different places and put it towards AI, which is kind of their big focus.

6:40And we've seen their massive spending sprees that they've been on. And with all of that, Bloomberg is reporting, according to anonymous sources like i mentioned that their executives are thinking about cutting the budget for their metaverse by 30 percent if meta goes ahead with that plan i think that's going to reflect kind of an overall lack of interest in some of their products meta has their social virtual reality platform horizon worlds as well as a virtual reality hardware and it doesn't feel like to me these are topics that i hear talked about a lot they're super hot were popular and I think that Meta knows they've spent an insane amount of money there and the adoption just might not be coming as soon as they thought.

7:20Now was it all a waste the billions and billions that Zuckerberg has poured into R &D in that direction? I actually don't think it was because I think right now what we're seeing with Meta's Ray-Bans has been you know largely come out of the labs researching for the Oculus VR headset a lot of the technology there and those Ray-Bans are incredibly popular I think that is the future I think if any device replaces a smartphone, it will be glasses, in my opinion, because you have an, you know, you have a microphone right next to your mouth, you have a speaker right next to your ear on the tail of the glasses, you can have cameras on the front of the glasses, and you have a screen, which is your lens, which can superimpose over what you're seeing in the real world.

7:58So if you're trying to do navigation or other things, like I could see glasses being a real, you know, instead of using your hands, you talk to your glasses, you could see things on your glasses, you can close pull away. Maybe there's like ways you can blink things in and out of view. I could just see like, if there's any device that overtakes a smartphone, in my opinion, it's going to be glass. It's a great form factor. It's a device that people are already used to wearing. It serves a purpose of shading your eyes from the sun. So I think for all intents and purposes, glasses are going to do really well and meta is set up better than anyone else to take over that department.

8:31I think Google is going to fight for it. I think Apple is going to fight for it because of kind of their VR play. But I think at the end of the day, Meta is going to do really well in that regard. But that doesn't mean that they don't need to cut all of the spending that they've put into their kind of Metaverse software, which is what it looks like they're doing. Since Meta rebranded, which for those forgetting this happened back in 2021, all of their investors have been pretty skeptical of their, you know, how they've been allocating resources and Zuckerberg has super voting control. So he gets to choose and put all that money in their Metaverse projects lose billions of dollars every single quarter.

9:04And I think their efforts in AI and smart glasses have been much more successful than that. So I think this is where they're going to probably start focusing on their shares rose after this report came out that they're going to cut spending 30 % on the metaverse. So I think overall, people are going to be pretty happy if we get that era behind us of heavy billion dollar multi billion dollar spending on metaverse software. Let's focus on the glasses in the hardware. That's really popular. Let's focus on AI. This is obviously very useful, has a lot of enterprise and other use cases, and I think it fits in with their business really well.

9:37So I'll be excited to see Meta try to cut back, become a little bit more lean, and add a bunch of these new features, all enabled by AI. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed it, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a rating or review on the show. On Apple, you can drop some stars, leave a comment on what you thought about the show today, or if the show has been helpful to you overall. It just helps, essentially just helps the show get found by more people when you leave reviews it's the number one way that they rank the shows and help them move up in the charts so people can find them so yeah if you could leave a rating review that would help the show out a ton thank you so much for tuning in make sure to go check out aibox.ai if you want to try all of these ai models in one place for 20 bucks a month and i'll catch you in the next episode