Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg meets key Samsung, LG officials

Seoul: Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong and LG CEO Cho Joo-wan on Wednesday to discuss ways to enhance corporate collaborations in the artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality (XR) sectors.

The CEO of Meta Platforms, Facebook's parent company, had a luncheon with Cho and other senior officials from the South Korean electronics giant in Seoul, according to officials from LG Electronics, reports Yonhap news agency.

Later in the day, Zuckerberg and Lee held talks over dinner at a reception hall the Samsung chairman uses for meetings with key officials to discuss collaborations in the areas of AI memory chips and XR businesses, according to sources.

Zuckerberg came to the South Korean capital the previous day to have a series of business meetings with key business gurus, including Cho and Lee.

Meta has earlier announced new plans to build its own artificial general intelligence (AGI) and work on a new AI chip.

Samsung, the world's No. 1 memory chipmaker, has created a new unit for AGI research and development in Silicon Valley.

Zuckerberg had met with Lee in South Korea in 2014 and visited Samsung Electronics' R&D lab in the United States in 2022.

The Cho-Zuckerberg meeting, meanwhile, came as the two companies shared mutual interest in advancing XR technologies as a key driver for future innovation and growth.

Last month during the ‘CES 2024’, Cho expressed the company's commitment to forging partnerships to expand its presence in the XR market.

Meta released its new virtual reality headset, the Quest 3, at the end of last year in a bid to take a lead in the fledgling XR market. It rivals Apple’s latest Vision Pro headset, which made its global debut last month.

In addition to his meetings with Samsung and LG executives, Zuckerberg met with representatives from at least five AI and XR startups, including AI startup Upstage, at Meta Korea's office in southern Seoul in a closed-door session, the sources said.

Meta reportedly arranged the meeting directly with the startups as part of apparent efforts to advance the company's XR headset technology.