29 February 2024 , 13:01
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Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Meta, has been meeting with technology bosses in Seoul as part of his visit to South Korea that highlights his ambitions in artificial intelligence.
This is part of his tour around Asia to meet business leaders about how they can work together on new technology. He's already been to Japan and will be heading to India next. On Wednesday, he spent two hours chatting with William Cho, chief executive officer at LG Electronics.
They talked about plans for something called extended reality (or XR for short), which is all about creating virtual experiences. While he was there, Zuckerberg got to try out some of Meta's latest gadgets, like their new virtual-reality headset, the Quest 3, and some smart glasses made by Ray-Ban.
LG said it's looking forward to working more closely with Meta. XR includes augmented reality and virtual reality, which mix real and computer-generated images. Later on Wednesday, Zuckerberg also met with Lee Jae-yong, who's the chairman of Samsung Electronics. And he's got a meeting lined up with the President of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, on today (Thursday, February 29).
"Meta already collaborated with high-end sunglasses brand Ray-Ban to launch smart glasses last year. Just like this, Meta could possibly want to introduce their XR technology to a worldwide customer base of a global consumer electronics maker like LG," said Kim Yang Paeng, a technology analyst at the Korea Institute of Economics and Technology.
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Kim said Zuckerberg will also likely talk with Samsung about producing Meta-exclusive chips to ease its reliance on the AI chip market-dominant NVIDIA. Zuckerberg's visit to Asia comes as Meta ramps up its efforts in artificial intelligence amid a race involving technology firms OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
In a Instagram reel in January, Zuckerberg said that it was Meta's "long term vision to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit." Meta is building massive compute infrastructure - equivalent to 600k NVIDIA H100 GPUs' worth - to support its artificial intelligence plans as it begins training its Llama 3 generative AI model, he said in the reel.
Generative AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot and Meta's Llama 3 are artificial intelligence systems that can generate content based on user prompts. Lee Tae-kyu, an expert, thinks Meta likes working with Samsung and LG because they are big tech companies from outside the US.
While in Tokyo, Zuckerberg met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and said to reporters: "We had a good productive conversation about AI and the future of technology, and I am really excited for the work that is happening here in Japan."