Meta Brings Advanced AI Chatbot to All of its Apps
With major investment in AI, and significant resources at its disposal, Metaâs now making a bigger move to challenge OpenAI, and others, within the generative AI space.
From today, users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger will be able to access Metaâs next-level generative AI assistant direct in the search bar of each app.
As you can see in this example, posted by Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, now, when you go to search in any of Metaâs main apps (i.e. not Threads as yet), youâll have access to Metaâs generative AI chat engine, where youâll be able to pose conversational queries, directly in the app.
As explained by Meta:
âBuilt with Meta Llama 3, Meta AI is one of the worldâs leading AI assistants, already on your phone, in your pocket for free. And itâs starting to go global with more features. You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger to get things done, learn, create and connect with the things that matter to you.â
So itâs essentially ChatGPT in Metaâs apps, which will enable you to pose queries to Metaâs advanced AI engine in-stream.
As you can see in this example, using the new chat option within IG chat, youâll be able to search the web for relevant info, adding more context to your discussions.
Which could be helpful, but then again, it wasnât when Meta first added it, back in 2017.
No, this isnât the first time that Metaâs tried to give people an AI-based assistant in-stream, with its M bot once providing virtually the same functionality.
But nobody cared.
Meta shut down M in 2018, and while the company noted at the time that it was happy with what it was able to learn from its M experiment, usage was very low, and it never really seemed to gain much momentum as a valuable add-on functionality.
As summed up by journalist Casey Newton at the time:
âIt felt like an amazing resource to have at my disposal, and yet in practice I almost never knew what to do with it.â
I would guess that this new feature will likely suffer the same fate, but Metaâs sure that with its new, super-powered Llama 3 engine driving this new chatbot option, itâll actually be far more useful this time around.
Indeed, the new Llama 3 model, according to Meta, is âthe most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.â
âWe’re releasing 8B and 70B parameter models – both best-in-class for their size. We’ve got more releases coming to bring multi-modality and longer context windows. We’re also still training a larger dense 400B+ parameter model.â
The more powerful Llama model will make Metaâs AI chatbot better than ChatGPT, and every other competitor in the market, which Metaâs hoping will get more people using it, while it can also do things like generate visuals in-stream, morphing in real-time as you type.
Youâll even be able to animate those visuals (to a degree) with additional prompts.
Metaâs also launching a new meta.ai website, so you can access its chatbot on your desktop PC, along with Meta AI prompts in-feed, to help you discover more based on what youâre seeing.
Which, again, replicates what its M chatbot did, and really, overall, I donât see there being a huge demand for these new features, which will also continue to push users away from the actual purpose of social apps.
That being actual, social connection.
While the latest generative AI tools are amazing in their capacity to provide us with advanced functionalities, which can help us find things online, create new content, and augment our activity, a lot of the actual results are not revolutionary.
And really, do you need to have this in-stream?
Like, how hard is it to search Google and come back, how much value is it really adding to have this info more immediately? And you could tell me that itâs hugely valuable, but I know that itâs not, because again, Metaâs tried this before, and nobody used it.
Like most of the gen AI features being added to social apps at the moment, in large part, they feel kind of forced, like the platforms feel that they have to add these tools, in fear of losing out to other AI providers. But I would argue that they donât actually add much to the general user experience.
Metaâs could be different, particularly because itâs just so much more powerful than other options at present. But will it be that big of a deal?
And once people can generate content in-stream, and they start sharing that, is that actually a good thing?
Weâve already seen Facebook flooded with fake AI images, which consistently bait many users into likes.
Incorporating generative AI more directly seems potentially even more problematic on this front, and in that sense, Iâm not sure that this is actually going to be as valuable, or beneficial, as Meta thinks.
But Mark Zuckerberg is enamored with AI, and is super keen to push more of these tools into his apps.
So weâre getting them either way, despite users not being interested in the past, and despite the rising issues that Metaâs already having with digitally generated images.
Metaâs new AI search tools are being made available from today to users in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.