Meta's chief AI officer says health will define its future models

Meta's AI strategy has a new north star: consumer health. Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said health capabilities will be the primary differentiator for Meta's next generation of AI models and the feature most likely to reach billions of users across its apps.

Wang, 29, joined the board at Meta after Mark Zuckerberg sank $14 billion into his data-labelling firm, Scale AI. He now heads up Meta Superintelligence Labs, Zuckerberg’s AI revamp project. Last April, his team unleashed their first product: Muse Spark.

When talking about Muse Spark's standing in the market, Wang was honest. He noted it wasn't quite hitting the heights of Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT. Muse Spark outperformed internal expectations, and Wang forecasts that upcoming versions will get much closer to the top spots.

Of Muse Spark's various capabilities, Wang singled out health as its strongest area and the lens through which Meta intends to build competitive advantage. "Health is an area that we view as really critical as we scale these models out to billions," he said.

People are now asking AI like ChatGPT and Claude for fitness tips, diet plans, health diagnoses, and mental health help. This trend is catching the attention of businesses and regulators who are worried about patient safety and privacy issues.

Wang mentioned that Muse Spark had some serious bio-risk concerns during development. He didn't go into details, though. Meta fixed these issues before releasing the model publicly. However, those risks led to a key decision: Muse Spark wouldn’t be made open source.