Facebook head Tom Alison announced on Wednesday that Meta is redesigning how Facebook suggests films for Reels, Groups, and the main Facebook Feed. The algorithm for suggesting videos is powered by AI. According to Alison, during a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco, “the world’s largest social network has already switched Reels, its TikTok competitor, to the new engine and plans to use it in all places within Facebook that show video — the main Facebook feed and Groups — as part of a “technology roadmap” through 2026.
Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app, which serves up vertical video clips and is known for its powerful recommendation engine that seems to know exactly what will keep users hooked, started exploding in popularity in the US in the last few years. When Facebook tested the new AI-powered recommendation engine with Reels, watch time went up by roughly 8 to 10 percent, Alison revealed. “So what that told us was this new model architecture is learning from the data much more efficiently than the previous generation,” Alison said. “So that was like a good sign that says, OK, we’re on the right track.”
Facebook has employed many recommendation systems for videos thus far for Reels, Groups, and the Facebook feed. However, the business intends to employ the same AI-powered engine in all of these products after experiencing success with Reels.
“Instead of just powering Reels, we’re working on a project to power our entire video ecosystem with this single model, and then can we add our Feed recommendation product to also be served by this model,” Alison said. “If we get this right, not only will the recommendations be kind of more engaging and more relevant, but we think the responsiveness of them can improve as well.”
The move is a part of Meta’s strategy to infuse AI into all its products after the technology exploded with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the end of 2022. The company is spending billions of dollars to buy up hundreds of thousands of pricey NVIDIA GPUs used to train and power AI models, Zuckerberg said in a video earlier this year.
