Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said billions of people would be using personal AI agents within the next five years, according to a report by TechCrunch. He said such systems would work around the clock, understand their owner's goals, and assist with tasks ranging from finance and health to household management and daily planning.
Zuckerberg added that Meta's messaging apps would grow in importance as AI agents became more widely adopted. He noted that WhatsApp was already the primary platform through which users interact with Meta AI, and that in the future people would use such services to communicate with several digital assistants at once.
Investors have so far been cautious about Meta's heavy AI spending. After the company published its quarterly results, its shares fell nearly 10 per cent. The Reality Labs division, which develops augmented and virtual reality hardware, recorded multi-billion-dollar losses again.
Meta said its business AI agents on WhatsApp and Messenger were already being used by more than one million companies. The company also announced a joint project with BlackRock to build a data centre worth 14 billion dollars to support its artificial intelligence operations.
