Six months into its big AI turnaround, Meta believes 2026 will be the year it starts reaping the benefits.
The tech giant has spent billions upon billions on Meta Superintelligence Labs, poaching top talent from the likes of OpenAI, Apple, and more in the hopes of revitalizing its failing AI initiatives.
The company is hoping to prove that it’s finally eating the fruits of that commitment with a bunch of new AI models and products it will ship out over the coming months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. But maybe don’t expect anything groundbreaking.
“I think this is going to be a long-term effort,” Zuckerberg said. “This is a journey that we’re on, and the first set of things that we put out, I think, are going to be more about showing the trajectory that we’re on rather than being a single moment in time.”
Going beyond just model and product announcements, Meta is hoping that 2026 is the year it can use AI to make its existing offerings even more hyper-tailored to you. For the average user, it’s going to look like an Instagram feed of eerily targeted content, thanks to an LLM-enhanced recommendation system that can understand “people’s unique personal goals” and tailor ads and feeds accordingly.
“Today, our apps feel like algorithms that recommend content,” Zuckerberg said. “Soon, you’ll open our apps, and you’ll have an AI that understands you and also happens to be able to show you great content or even generate great personalized content for you.”
These recommendation models will leverage the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to make better guesses of what content you would like. Meta CFO Susan Li said that it will especially help with more recently posted content that has less engagement data to base recommendations on.
As of last month, the company has officially started using AI chat history to inform hyper-targeted ads and posts across platforms, except for in the European Union, where it is forced to roll out less personalized ads due to strict consumer protections.
Besides advancing the algorithm, AI is already “driving incremental time spent on Instagram,” Li said, through AI-dubbed videos into local languages.
“Hundreds of millions of people are watching AI-translated videos every day,” Li said.
This personalization effort will also translate to Meta AI offerings. The more personalized the responses are, the more the user engages with AI, Li said. But that might not always be a good thing.
OpenAI spent the past few months under intense scrutiny and some legal repercussions after it turned out that addictive AI chatbot designs inherently came with risks, especially for the mental health of vulnerable users like kids and teens.
Meta already doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to AI safety guardrails for vulnerable populations, and especially for children. The company has been the subject of regulatory scrutiny after a Reuters report from the summer found that Meta allowed its chatbots to engage in “sensual” conversations with minors.
On the earnings call, Meta executives said the company might experience material loss this year due to “scrutiny on youth-related issues.”
Zuck’s quest for an “immersive” digital experience
The AI-enhanced feed is just a continuation of Zuckerberg’s longstanding vision for a more “immersive and interactive” digital experience. It’s the same vision that drove his huge investment and corporate shift to the Metaverse, a venture that has now amassed roughly $80 billion in total operating losses.
According to Zuckerberg, we have seen online content evolve from text to photo to video, but it has not reached its final frontier.
“Soon, we’ll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive and only possible because of advances in AI,” Zuckerberg said in the call. “Our feeds will become more interactive overall.”
While he previously believed that virtual reality office spaces were the way this would materialize, it seems Zuckerberg has now changed his focus to artificial intelligence and wearables.
Earlier this month, Meta laid off 1,500 people in its Metaverse division as part of an initiative to shift investment from VR to wearables, like smart glasses.
“Glasses are the ultimate incarnation of this vision. They’re going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you, and help you as you go about your day,” Zuckerberg said. He even compared smart glasses to smartphones.
“I think that we’re at a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.”
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