India is on track to have the largest app developer base in the world by 2024 and already has one of the largest Spark augmented reality (AR) developer communities, Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Meta (formerly known as Facebook), said on Wednesday.
Speaking at Meta’s Fuel for India, 2021, Zuckerberg said that the company also has the highest level of tools for safety and security in the Internet world, which has increased over the last five years.
“We have just dramatically increased the level of effort that we’ve put into this to the point that we’re now investing more than $5 billion a year in safety and security, have more than 40,000 people working on those programmes and I think we’re clearly the industry leaders at this point, in terms of being able to have AI systems that can identify all of the 20 different categories of harmful content and drive down the amount of that content that we’re seeing on our platforms,” he said.
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He said such efforts give Meta to work with other companies in the industry, to set open standards for how things should evolve and work with civil societies and regulators and governments around the world on these standards and engage the questions that people have.
“In retrospect, I wish that we’d done that level of effort from the beginning when we were designing some of these social media apps and we have the opportunity to do that here with the Metaverse, which we’re really trying to do by setting out the vision about what we think this can be years before it’s actually going to fully materialise,” Zuckerberg said.
He said Meta is also investing in other growing areas like education and commerce through Unacademy and Meesho, which are important use cases for building the company’s future.
“We want to continue to partner in all of these areas as we accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, the social platforms and creative tools that are going to be necessary to bring the metaverse to life…In order for the metaverse to work, this isn’t going to get built by any one company or even a small number of companies – we’re going to need to empower millions of creators around the world,” he said.
The company also announced that it will expand its partnership with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to provide a curriculum on Digital Safety & Online Well-being and AR for over 10 million students and one-million educators in India.
Additionally, in line with the government’s vision of universalising education, Meta and CBSE will democratise the high school curriculum by allowing students access to quality educational content online through modules that would be made available on CBSE’s website, he said.
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“I think it’s a huge opportunity to (invest in) this entrepreneurial spirit and bring some of these tools around the metaverse, AR and training to the education system here in India,” the Facebook Chief said.
“When we’re thinking about what the next generation is going to look like in terms of where these creators and developers are going to come from, who are going to build the foundation of the metaverse – I think it’s obvious India is going to be a huge part of that,” he added.
