In a recent Meta earnings call, which saw the word “AI” used approximately 57 times, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that artificial intelligence would be a “key theme,” of the company going forward and that it would soon see integration into all of its applications.

“I’ve emphasized for a number of these calls now that there are two major technological waves driving our roadmap — a huge AI wave today and a building metaverse wave for the future,” shared Zuckerberg.

The CEO noted that since the launch of Reels on Instagram, “AI recommendations have driven a more than 24 percent increase in time spent on Instagram,” and that over 20 percent of the content in Facebook and Instagram feeds are recommended by AI.

As for the effects on Reels monetization, he shared that Instagram and Facebook are up 30 and 40 percent quarter-over-quarter respectively.

“I think there’s an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” shared Zuckerberg, going on to hint that the company’s latest development, its own large language model, LLaMA, could eventually be available to the public — though at the time of writing it is only accessible to a group of researchers.

Areas Meta shared it is exploring for public AI use include features for WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for content on Facebook and Instagram, as well as ad generation, and more.

“I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience. Over time, this will extend to our work on the metaverse too, where people will much more easily be able to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code to tie all of them together,” said Zuckerberg.

While the metaverse was mentioned, its total air time was roughly 90 seconds, while AI was the star of the call, having been spoken about for nearly 6 minutes during the quarter one earning call. Nonetheless, it would seem Meta is still adamant in its pursuit and will soon look to merge the two technologies.

Following the report, Meta’s stock jumped roughly 14 percent, beating out Wall Street expectations. While like the metaverse, investing in AI can be slow and costly — although, with the trove of data available to the social platform giant, the move is expected to pay off.

In other news, Google takes next steps in AI future with launch of Google DeepMind.