Manufacturing of Japanese “katanas”, participation in an extravagant Indian wedding and – incidentally – negotiations around artificial intelligence… This is the program of Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) during his tour in Asia.
After a few days spent skiing with his family, the American multi-billionaire is due to meet Meta developers in Tokyo on Monday February 26 and Tuesday February 27, according to the agency. Bloomberg. In the meantime, Mark Zuckerberg is increasing his posts on social networks. A video shows him making “katanas”, these traditional Japanese swords, at a craftsman in Kumagaya, in the Saitama department (north of Tokyo).
Head to South Korea for the continuation of the 39-year-old American’s Asian journey. Starting Wednesday, February 28, Mark Zuckerberg is likely to meet with President Yoon Suk Yeol, as well as the bosses of the country’s tech giants Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, according to local media. However, Samsung and Meta officials declined to comment on the possible meeting of the two company leaders.
Discussions with Samsung and LG
According to information from Asia News Networkif Mark Zuckerberg meets with Samsung Electronics CEO Lee Jae-yong — as he did during his first trip to Korea in June 2013 — the agenda will likely include artificial intelligence chips [IA] and other issues around generative AI”. The latter notion refers to the use of AI to create new content, such as text, images, music, audio and videos .
At the same time, with the boss of LG Electronics, Cho Joo-wan, the American should also discuss possible cooperation between their two groups to develop a new extended reality headset (virtual, mixed and augmented reality) in order to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro which has just been released, according to the daily Korea Economic Daily.
“Zuckerberg and Cho will also discuss the application of the operating system (OS)”, including the “extended reality” headset (extended RealityXR) developed by LG, but also “the use of Meta’s AI services for LG home appliances”, specifies the local newspaper.
At the end of the week, Mark Zuckerberg is expected in India, where he will attend the wedding of one of the sons of Mukesh Ambani, the extremely wealthy boss of the Reliance Industries conglomerate. The latter is the 10th largest fortune in the world, according to the ranking of The Forbes. Mark Zuckerberg is ranked fourth.
As a reminder, Meta has already invested billions of dollars in Jio, the digital services entity of Reliance, which seeks to make it an Indian e-commerce giant. At this wedding, Mark Zuckerberg will find, among the thousand guests, other celebrities, such as Bill and Melinda Gates, the CEO of Disney Bob Iger or even Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump, we can read in The Hindustan Times, an English-language daily based in New Delhi.