The company has signed a deal with generative AI lab Midjourney, the Facebook parent’s chief AI officer said on Friday. In a separate deal reported by Reuters, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech firm signed a $10 billion partnership with Google.
The developments come at a time when the company is restructuring its AI efforts by building the Meta SuperIntelligence Labs, which has seen Mark Zuckerberg poaching top AI talents from rivals including ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Here are the two MAJOR deals Meta has signed recently to give a push to its AI dreams.
Meta-Midjourney partnership
Meta has signed a deal with Midjourney, the generative AI lab, to licence the startup’s “aesthetic technology” for the Facebook parent’s future products and models.
This technical partnership will bring together both the companies’ research teams, ‘bringing beauty to billions’, Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said in an X post on Friday.
“We are incredibly impressed by Midjourney. They have accomplished true feats of technical and aesthetic excellence, and we are thrilled to be working more closely with them,” he said.
The move signals Meta’s push to differentiate its products on visual quality. Generating images from text prompts, Midjourney licenses its tools to users through a subscription model.
“To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach. This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap, and working with the best players across the industry,” Wang said.
Midjourney’s AI capabilities could help Meta scale up its user experience in terms of AI image generation, potentially bringing down content production costs and shoting up engagement.
Meta signs $10 billion deal with Google
To further its AI journey, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company has reportedly also signed a deal with Google worth over $10 billion, Reuters reported quoting a source.
Google’s six-year cloud computing deal with Meta Platform is the second big agreement in recent months after the Sundar Pichi-led giant partnered with OpenAI.
Meta will be able to access Google Cloud’s servers, storage, networking and other services under the agreement, according to the report.
Meta is seeking outside partners to help it fund the massive infrastructure needed to power AI by offloading $2 billion in data centre assets, the company disclosed in a filing earlier this month.
