A (0:00)

What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Co. Omaha, Nebraska and in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

B (0:29)

Meta 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, every everything from Meta, their latest llama models, go check out my startup AI box. AI. You can get access to all of the latest AI models from Gemini to Anthropic to OpenAI to Mistral. You 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 a hundred different platforms. You can get it all at AI box. 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. The 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's from my personal experience and so while 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, to work at a organization. I only want to talk to a human. Humans cost a lot of money and there's like a lot of limitations. You gotta wait in line and yada yada, it's just not super feasible. But with the rise of AI support assistance, while I know a lot of People maybe don't like them because they're 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 that's, 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. 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 again. I also think this is going to be great for Meta kind of with their Meta AI because it's going to increase adoption and 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. They 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. Something 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 or they refused to enable them and you know, they're. It's affecting their livelihoods and their businesses or other things. And I think Meta is probably trying to approach that. Um, Meta 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, their innovation comes from, 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, I 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, the privacy features. Apparently it's to make things easier for users, but I think changing it 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 the 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. So 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, um, 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. And 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%. 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 or 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. Now, 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. 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. So if you're trying to do navigation or other things, like I. 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. I think Google is going to fight for it. I think Apple's 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. And 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 were 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 and 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. So 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 AI box 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.