Meta is rolling out an advanced AI chatbot across all of its applications.
With a major investment in AI and significant resources at its disposal, Meta is now taking an even bigger step to challenge OpenAI and others in the generative AI space.
Starting today, users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger will be able to access Meta's next-level generative AI assistant right in the search bar of each app.
Now, when you go to search in any of Meta's core apps (i.e. not Threads yet), you'll have access to Meta's generative chat engine, where you can ask conversational questions right in the app.
As Meta explained:
"Meta AI, powered by Meta Llama 3, is one of the world's leading artificial intelligence assistants that is already in your phone and in your pocket for free. And it's starting to go global with more features. You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger to pursue goals, learn, create and communicate with the things that matter to you."
So it's essentially ChatGPT in Meta apps, which will allow you to ask queries directly in the stream to Meta's advanced artificial intelligence engine.
Meta AI
As you can see in this example, using the new chat option in IG chat, you'll be able to search the web for relevant information, adding more context to your discussions.
This could be useful, but, again, it wasn't when Meta first added it, back in 2017.
Meta M chatbot
No, this isn't the first time Meta has tried to provide people with a built-in AI-based assistant, and its M bot once provided pretty much the same functionality.
But no one cared about that.
Meta shut down M in 2018, and while the company noted at the time that it was pleased with what it had learned from its experiment, its usage was very low, and it never seemed to gain much traction as a valuable addition.
As journalist Casey Newton summarized at the time:
"I had a terrific resource at my disposal, but in practice I almost never knew what to do with it."
My guess is that this new feature will likely suffer the same fate, but Meta is confident that thanks to the new, super-powerful Llama 3 engine driving this new chatbot option, it will be much more useful this time around.
Indeed, the new Llama 3 model, according to Meta, is "the smartest AI assistant you can freely use".
"We have 8B and 70B models - both best in class for their size. We have new releases that will bring multimodality and longer context windows. We are also still training a larger dense model with 400B+ parameters."
Meta AI
The more powerful Llama model will make Meta's AI chatbot better than ChatGPT and any other competitor on the market, which Meta hopes will get more people using it, and will also be able to do things like create real-time visuals, real-time transforms. as you type.
You'll even be able to animate these visual effects (to some extent) with additional tooltips.
Meta is also launching a new website, Meta.ai, so you can access its chatbot on your desktop PC, as well as Meta AI prompts in the feed to help you learn more based on what you see.
While the latest generative artificial intelligence tools are amazing in their ability to provide us with advanced functionality that can help us find things online, create new content, and expand our activities, many of the actual results are not revolutionary.
And really, do you really need to have that in-stream?
For example, how hard is it to do a Google search and go back, what value does the ability to get that information immediately actually provide?
And you could tell me that it's extremely valuable, but I know it's not, because, again, Meta has tried this before and nobody's used it.
Like most of the AI features that are being added to social apps these days, for the most part they seem forced, like platforms feel like they have to add these tools for fear of losing out to other AI providers. But I would argue that they don't really add much to the overall user experience.
Meta could be different, especially because it's currently so much more powerful than other options. But will it make that much difference?
And once people can generate content in real time and start sharing it, will it actually be a good thing?
We've already seen Facebook flooded with fake AI images, which constantly attract a lot of users to likes.
Facebook's AI message
A more direct implementation of generative AI on this front seems potentially even more problematic, and in that sense I'm not sure it would actually be as valuable or useful as Meta thinks.
But Mark Zuckerberg is fascinated by artificial intelligence and really wants to embed more of these tools in his apps.
So we get them anyway, despite users' lack of interest in the past and despite the growing problems Meta is already having with digitally created images.
Meta's new artificial intelligence search tools are available to users in the US, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe from today.