Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg traveled to South Korea to speak with LG Electronics executives about cooperation between the two companies on virtual reality devices and his company's plans regarding the usage of artificial intelligence.
Zuckerberg is currently on the second leg of a three-nation tour of Asia that analysts believe is meant to foster greater cooperation between Meta and LG.
Zuckerberg has already visited Japan and intends to visit India later this week.
LG Electronics CEO William Cho and Zuckerberg spoke for several hours about a combined strategy for the XR, a device in development.
While experiencing Meta's latest virtual-reality headset, the Quest 3, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Cho "expressed a keen interest in Meta's advanced technology demonstrations, notably focusing on Meta's large language models and its potential for on-device AI integration," the LG statement said.
LG and Meta are gearing up to expedite the XR venture, which includes augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and other technologies.
What Else Did Zuckerberg Do?
Zuckerberg also met with Samsung Electronics head Lee Jae-yong later that same day and is expected to meet with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday.
"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.
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.
Meta is in competition with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft on how to best leverage artificial intelligence to enhance their products. In an 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."
Additionally, Meta is building an infrastructure that is equivalent to equivalent to 600k NVIDIA H100 GPUs' worth to support its artificial intelligence plans as it begins training its Llama 3 generative AI model.
