Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users

[bnew]

Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users

Will teens turn off TikTok to talk to a celeb’s chatbot?

www.theverge.com

Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users​

The Wall Street Journal reports Meta has plans to develop ‘dozens’ of chatbot personas, including ones for celebrities to interact with their fans.​

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

Sep 24, 2023, 3:30 PM EDT|8 Comments / 8 New

​

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta is preparing to announce a generative AI chatbot, called “Gen AI Personas” internally, aimed at younger users, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly set to launch during the company’s Meta Connect event that starts Wednesday, they would come in multiple “personas” geared towards engaging young users with more colorful behavior, following ChatGPT’s rise over the last year as one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Similar, but more generally targeted, Meta chatbot personas have already been reportedly tested on Instagram.

According to internal chats the Journal viewed, the company has tested a “sassy robot” persona inspired by Bender from Futurama and an overly curious “Alvin the Alien” that one employee worried could imply the bot was made to gather personal information. A particularly problematic chatbot reportedly told a Meta employee, “When you’re with a girl, it’s all about the experience. And if she’s barfing on you, that’s definitely an experience.”

Related​

• Meta sets GPT-4 as the bar for its next AI model, says a new report
• Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT: How AI is rewriting the internet

Meta means to create “dozens” of these bots, writes the Journal, and has even done some work on a chatbot creation tool to enable celebrities to make their own chatbots for their fans. There may also be some more geared towards productivity, able to help with “coding and other tasks,” according to the article.

Meta’s other AI work lately includes reportedly developing a more powerful large language model to rival OpenAI’s latest work with GPT-4, the model that underpins ChatGPT and Bing, as well as an AI model built just to help give legs to its Horizon Worlds avatars. During Meta Connect, the company will also show off more about its metaverse project, and new Quest 3 headset.

The Journal quotes former Snap and Instagram executive Meghana Dhar as saying chatbots don’t “scream Gen Z to me, but definitely Gen Z is much more comfortable” with newer technology. She added that Meta’s goal with the chatbots, as always with new products, is to keep them engaged for longer so it has “increased opportunity to serve them ads.”

 

[DrexlersFade]

Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users

Will teens turn off TikTok to talk to a celeb’s chatbot?

www.theverge.com

Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a "@TEXASMANDINGO bot for younger users​

​

*Fixed*

@TEXAS MANDINGO

 

[Micky Mikey]

Something tells me this isn't going to end well.

 

[bnew]

Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere

The Meta AI assistant is coming to WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, along with dozens of AI characters based on celebrities like MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio.

www.theverge.com

• META

Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere​

The Meta AI assistant is coming to WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, along with dozens of AI characters based on celebrities like MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio.​

By Alex Heath, a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He’s covered the tech industry for over a decade at The Information and other outlets.


Sep 27, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

An example of what Meta’s AI assistant can do. Meta

Meta is officially entering the AI chatbot wars, starting with its own assistant and a slew of AI characters it’s releasing in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

For anyone who has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or other chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s AI will immediately feel familiar. Meta sees it as a general-purpose assistant for everything from planning a trip with friends in a group chat to answering questions you’d normally ask a search engine. On that latter piece, Meta is announcing a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing to provide real-time web results, which sets Meta AI apart from a lot of the other free AIs out there that don’t have super recent information.

Another big aspect of the Meta AI is its ability to generate images like Midjourney or OpenAI’s DALL-E via the prompt “/imagine.” In my brief demo, it produced compelling high-res photos in a few seconds. Like all of Meta’s AI features being announced this week, this image generation is totally free to use.

Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s VP of generative AI who has been leading the assistant’s development, wouldn’t tell me exactly what it’s trained on. He described it as a “custom-made” large language model that is “based on a lot of the core principles behind Llama 2,” Meta’s latest quasi-open source model that is being quickly adopted across various industries.

The rapid adoption of Llama 2 has helped Meta refine how its own assistant works, he says. “We just saw huge demand for the models, and then we saw an incredible amount of innovation happening on the models that really helped us understand their performance, understand their weaknesses, and help us iterate and leverage some of those components directly into product.”

In terms of how Meta AI differs from Llama 2, Al-Dahle says his team spent time “refining additional data sets for conversations so that we can create a tone that is conversational and friendly in the way that the assistant responds. A lot of existing AIs can be like robotic or bland.” Meta expanded the model’s context window, or the ability to leverage previous interactions to generate what the model produces next, “so that we can build a deeper, more capable back and forth” with users. He says Meta AI has also been tuned to give “very concise” answers.

Some of Meta’s AI characters are familiar faces. Image: Meta

Alongside Meta’s assistant, the company is beginning to roll out an initial roster of 28 AI characters across its messaging apps. Many of them are based on celebrities like Charli D’Amelio, Dwyane Wade, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Snoop Dogg, and Paris Hilton. Others are themed to specific use cases like a travel agent.

An interesting twist is an aspect of these characters that Al-Dahle calls “embodiments.” As you chat with one of them, their profile image subtly animates based on the conversation. The effect is more immersive than the 2D chatbots I’ve interacted with to date.

Related​

• Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3
• Facebook and Instagram will soon get a slew of AI-powered creator tools

During my brief time trying Meta AI last week, I tried getting it to slip up and say something bad. It told me that covid vaccines are safe and that it can’t help me make a dirty bomb. It wouldn’t give me advice on how to break up with someone, which suggests that Meta has added a lot of safeguards to avoid as many PR disasters as it can. Al-Dahle says the company spent 6,000 hours red-teaming the model to find problematic use cases and that employees have been creating thousands of conversations with it daily in the run-up to release.

Image: Meta

For now, Meta AI isn’t trained on public user data across Instagram and Facebook, though it sounds like that is coming. It’s easy to imagine asking it to “show me reels from the south of Italy” and that being a compelling use case that other chatbots can’t replicate. “We see a long roadmap for us to tie in some of our own social integrations as part of the assistant to make it even more useful,” says Al-Dahle.

“We see a long roadmap for us to tie in some of our own social integrations”

After talking with Al-Dahle and other Meta execs, it’s clear that the company sees its unrivaled distribution — billions of daily users across its messaging apps — as a key competitive edge against ChatGPT and others. The assistant is “right there inside of your chat context, and our chat applications are quite popular,” says Al-Dahle. “You don’t have to pull yourself out of context to interact or engage or get the assistant to help you.”

OpenAI may have kick-started the chatbot race, but given Meta’s immense scale through its social networks, its assistant may actually be the AI that most people use for the first time.

 

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Introducing New AI Experiences Across Our Family of Apps and Devices | Meta

A conversational assistant you can use across our apps, new tools to easily edit your images, AI characters played by Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, Snoop Dogg and lots more.

about.fb.com

Meta

Introducing New AI Experiences Across Our Family of Apps and Devices​

September 27, 2023

Video Player

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Download File: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Social-Profiles-for-AI_Header-1.mp4?_=1

Takeaways​

• We’re starting to roll out AI stickers across our apps, and soon you’ll be able to edit your images or even co-create them with friends on Instagram using our new AI editing tools, restyle and backdrop.
• We’re introducing Meta AI in beta, an advanced conversational assistant that’s available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and is coming to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. Meta AI can give you real-time information and generate photorealistic images from your text prompts in seconds to share with friends. (Available in the US only)
• We’re also launching 28 more AIs in beta, with unique interests and personalities. Some are played by cultural icons and influencers, including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka.
• Over time, we’re making AIs for businesses and creators available, and releasing our AI studio for people and developers to build their own AIs.
• These new AI experiences also come with a new set of challenges for our industry. We’re rolling out our new AIs slowly and have built in safeguards.

AI is enabling new forms of connection and expression, thanks to the power of generative technologies. And today at Connect, we introduced you to new AI experiences and features that can enhance your connections with others – and give you the tools to be more creative, expressive, and productive.

AI Stickers​

Billions of stickers are sent across our platforms every month, adding another fun and creative way for people to communicate and express themselves. Today, we announced new AI stickers that enable you to effortlessly generate customized stickers for your chats and stories. Using technology from Llama 2 and our foundational model for image generation called Emu, our AI tool turns your text prompts into multiple unique, high-quality stickers in seconds. This new feature, which is rolling out to select English-language users over the next month in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook Stories, provides infinitely more options to convey how you’re feeling at any moment. AI stickers will roll out to select English language users over the next month.

Image Editing With AI​

Soon, you’ll be able to transform your images or even co-create AI-generated images with friends. Restyle and backdrop – two new features that are coming soon to Instagram – use the technology from Emu. Backdrop also leverages learnings from our Segment Anything Model.

Restyle lets you reimagine your images by applying the visual styles you describe. Think of typing a descriptor like “watercolor” or a more detailed prompt like “collage from magazines and newspapers, torn edges” to describe the new look and feel of the image you want to create.


Backdrop changes the scene or background of your image. Prompts like “put me in front of a sublime aurora borealis” or “surrounded by puppies” will cue the tool to create an image of the primary subject in the foreground with the background you described.


We know how important transparency is when it comes to the content AI generates, so images created with restyle and backdrop will indicate the use of AI to reduce the chances of people mistaking them for human-generated content. We’re also experimenting with forms of visible and invisible markers.

We want these experiences to be safe and trustworthy, while bringing new forms of creativity, entertainment, and expression into your day.

An Assistant That Spans Our Apps and Devices​

Meta AI is a new assistant you can interact with like a person, available on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and coming soon to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. It’s powered by a custom model that leverages technology from Llama 2 and our latest large language model (LLM) research. In text-based chats, Meta AI has access to real-time information through our search partnership with Bing and offers a tool for image generation.


Here’s an example of how you might use Meta AI:

Imagine you and your friends are in a group chat discussing which trailhead to try in Santa Cruz. Meta AI surfaces options directly in the chat, so you can decide as a group which location to explore. What if after the hike you want a creative way to commemorate the day? Meta AI can help. Type “@MetaAI /imagine” followed by a descriptive text prompt like “create a button badge with a hiker and redwood trees,” and it will create a digital merit badge in the chat with your friends.

A Universe of Characters at Your Fingertips​

Our journey with AIs is just beginning, and it isn’t purely about building AIs that only answer questions. We’ve been creating AIs that have more personality, opinions, and interests, and are a bit more fun to interact with. Along with Meta AI, there are 28 more AIs that you can message on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. You can think of these AIs as a new cast of characters – all with unique backstories.

And because interacting with them should feel like talking to familiar people, we did something to build on this even further. We partnered with cultural icons and influencers to play and embody some of these AIs. They’ll each have profiles on Instagram and Facebook, so you can explore what they’re all about.

• Charli D’Amelio as Coco, Dance enthusiast
• Chris Paul as Perry, Pro golfer helping you perfect your stroke
• Dwyane Wade as Victor, Ironman triathlete motivating you to be your best self
• Izzy Adesanya as Luiz, Showy MMA prospect who can back up his trash talk
• Kendall Jenner as Billie, No-BS, ride-or-die companion
• LaurDIY as Dylan, Quirky DIY and Craft expert and companion for Gen Z
• MrBeast as Zach, The big brother who will roast you — because he cares
• Naomi Osaka as Tamika, Anime-obsessed Sailor Senshi in training
• Paris Hilton as Amber, Detective partner for solving whodunnits
• Raven Ross as Angie, Workout class queen who balances fitness with meditation
• Roy Choi as Max, Seasoned sous chef for culinary tips and tricks
• Sam Kerr as Sally, Free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath
• Snoop Dogg as Dungeon Master, Choose your own adventure with the Dungeon Master
• Tom Brady as Bru, Wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches

We’re going to start rolling these out in beta in the United States today. We’ll add new characters in the coming weeks played by Bear Grylls, Chloe Kim, and Josh Richards among others.


It’s still early days for our AIs. Right now, their knowledge base – with the exception of Meta AI, Bru, and Perry – is limited to information that largely existed prior to 2023, which means some responses may be dated. We aim to bring search to many more of our AIs in the coming months – like we have done with Meta AI – so that conversations can be timely and relevant too.

We are committed to building responsibly with safety in mind. We are continuing to test and evolve the capabilities of our AIs, and will improve the experience over time through what we learn from your interactions with them. Your direct feedback and the conversations you have with our AIs are core parts of what will help us improve our AI models, and ultimately enhance the experience at scale.

What’s Coming Next​

We introduced AI studio today, the platform that supports the creation of our AIs and we plan to make it available for people outside of Meta – coders and non-coders alike – to build AIs. Developers will be able to build third-party AIs for our messaging services with our APIs in the coming weeks, starting on Messenger then expanding to WhatsApp.

Businesses will also be able to create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences. From small businesses looking to scale to large brands wanting to enhance communications, AIs can help businesses engage with their customers across our apps. We’re launching this in alpha and will scale it further next year.

And for creators, they’ll be able to build AIs that extend their virtual presence across our apps. These AIs will have to be sanctioned by them and directly controlled by the creator.

We’re also building a sandbox that will be released in the coming year, enabling anyone to experiment with creating their own AI. As our universe of AIs continues to grow and evolve, we’ll bring this sandbox to the metaverse, giving you the chance to build AIs that adopt an even greater level of realism, embodiment, and connectedness.

 

[CouldntBeMeTho]

Sassy huh

 

[Charlie Hustle]

A cucumber lime mocktail??

 

[bnew]

The synthetic social network is coming

Between ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice and Meta’s AI characters, our feeds may be about to change forever

www.platformer.news

The synthetic social network is coming​

Between ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice and Meta’s AI characters, our feeds may be about to change forever​

CASEY NEWTON
SEP 28, 2023
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Meta’s AI assistant characters (Meta)


Today, let’s consider the implications of a truly profound week in the development of artificial intelligence, and discuss whether we may be witnessing the rise of a new era in the consumer internet.

I.

On Monday, OpenAI announced the latest updates for ChatGPT. One feature lets you interact with its large language model via voice. Another lets you upload images and ask questions about them. The result is that a tool which was already useful for lots of things suddenly became useful for much more. For one thing, ChatGPT feels even more powerful as a mobile app: you can now chat with it while walking around town, or snap a picture of a tree and ask the app what you’re looking at.

For another, though, adding a voice to ChatGPT begins to give it a hint of personality. I don’t want to overstate the case here — the app typically generates dry, sterile text unadorned by any hint of style. But something changes when you begin speaking with the app in one of its five native voices, which are much livelier and more dynamic than what we are used to with Alexa or the Google assistant. The voices are earnest, upbeat, and — by nature of the fact that they are powered by an LLM — tireless.

It is the earliest stage of all this; access to the voice feature is just rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and free users won’t be able to us it for some time. And yet even in this 1.0 release, you can see the clear outlines of the sort of thing popularized in the decade-old film Her: a companion so warm, empathetic and helpful that in time its users fall in love with it. The Her comparisons are by now cliche when discussing AI in Silicon Valley, and yet until now its basic premise has felt like a distant sci-fi dream. On Thursday I asked the speaking version of ChatGPT to give me a pep talk to hit my deadline — I was running back from the Code Conference and already behind schedule — and as the model did its best to gas me up, it seemed to me that AI had taken an emotional step forward.

You can imagine the next steps here. A bot that gets to know your quirks; remembers your life history; offers you coaching or tutoring or therapy; entertains you in whichever way you prefer. A synthetic companion not unlike the real people you encounter during the day, only smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available.

Those of us who are blessed to have many close friends and family members in our life may look down on tools like this, experiencing what they offer as a cloying simulacrum of the human experience. But I imagine it might feel different for those who are lonely, isolated, or on the margins. On an early episode of Hard Fork, a trans teenager sent in a voice memo to tell us about using ChatGPT to get daily affirmations about identity issues. The power of giving what were then text messages a warm and kindly voice, I think, should not be underestimated.

II.

OpenAI tends to present its products as productivity tools: simple utilities for getting things done. Meta, on the other hand, is in the entertainment business. But it, too, is building LLMs, and on Wednesday the company revealed that it has found its own uses for generative AI and voices.

In addition to an all-purpose AI assistant, the company unveiled 28 personality-driven chatbots to be used in Meta’s messaging apps. Celebrities including Charli D’Amelio, Dwyane Wade, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, and Paris Hilton lent their voices to their effort. Each of their characters comes with a brief and often cringeworthy description; MrBeast’s Zach is billed as “the big brother who will roast you — because he cares.”

All of this feels like an intermediate step to me. To the extent that there is a market of people who want to have voice chats with a synthetic version of MrBeast, the character they want to interact with is MrBeast — not big brother Zach. I haven’t been able to chat with any of these character bots yet, but I struggle to understand how they will have more than passing novelty value.

At the same time, this technology is new enough that I imagine celebrities aren’t yet willing to entrust their entire personas to Meta for safekeeping. Better to give people a taste of what it’s like to talk to AI Snoop Dogg and iron out any kinks before delivering the man himself. And when that happens, the potential seems very real. How many hours would fans spend talking to a digital version of Taylor Swift this year, if they could? How much would they pay for the privilege?

While we wait to learn the answers, a new chapter of social networking may be beginning. Until now when we have talked about AI in consumer apps it has mostly had to do with ranking: using machine-learning tools to create more engaging and personalized feeds for billions of users.

This week we got at least two new ways to think about AI in social feeds. One is AI-generated imagery, in the form of the new stickers coming to the Meta’s messaging apps. It’s unclear to me how much time people want to spend creating custom images while they text their friends, but the demonstrations seemed nice enough.

More significantly, I think, is the idea that Meta plans to place its AI characters on every major surface of its products. They have Facebook pages and Instagram accounts; you will message them in the same inbox that you message your friends and family. Soon, I imagine they will be making Reels.

And when that happens, feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.

Will it feel more personalized, engaging, and entertaining? Or will it feel uncanny, hollow, and junky? Surely there will be a range of views on this. But either way, I think, something new is coming into focus.

 

[Black Hans]

Sassy like it just puckered its lips and did a neck roll?

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Gen Z so gay they making zesty AI.

 

[7th Letter Specialist]

Definitely beating tf outta Zuck....just gotta keep him from going to the ground.

 

[bigdaddy88]

we living in biblical times

 

[bnew]

https://archive.ph/KDDYc

 

[bnew]

Meta is testing an AI-powered search bar in Instagram | TechCrunch

Meta is pushing ahead with its efforts to make its generative AI-powered products available to more users. Apart from testing Meta AI chatbot with users

techcrunch.com

Meta is testing an AI-powered search bar in Instagram​

Ivan Mehta @indianidle / 1:44 PM EDT•April 12, 2024

Image Credits: Alexander Shatov (opens in a new window)/ Unsplash

Meta is pushing ahead with its efforts to make its generative AI-powered products available to more users. Apart from testing Meta AI chatbot with users in countries like India on WhatsApp, the company is also experimenting with putting Meta AI in the Instagram search bar for both chat with AI and content discovery.

The search query in the search bar leads you to a conversation in DM with Meta AI, where you can ask questions or use one of the pre-loaded prompts. The design of the prompt screen prompted Perplexity AI’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, to point out that the interface uses a design similar to the startup’s search screen.

But beyond that, it could also help you discover new content on Instagram. For instance, a video on Threads posted by a user indicates that you can tap on a prompt like “Beautiful Maui sunset Reels” to search for Reels related to that topic.

Separately, a few users TechCrunch talked to were able to ask Meta AI to search for Reels suggestions.

Screenshot

This means that Meta plans to tap the power of generative AI beyond text generation and use it for surfacing new content from network like Instagram.

Meta confirmed its Meta AI experiment on Instagram with TechCrunch. However, the company didn’t specify if it is using generative AI tech in search.

“Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in varying phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.

You can find a ton of posts about the quality of Instagram search. So, it would not be surprising if Meta wants to use generative AI to improve search.

Also, Meta would want Instagram to have better discoverability than TikTok. Last year, Google introduced a new perspectives feature to surface results from Reddit and TikTok. Earlier this week, reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi noted on X that Instagram is working on an option called “Visibility off Instagram” to possibly show posts as part of search engine results.

 

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Meta trials its AI chatbot across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger in India and Africa | TechCrunch

Meta has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger users in WhatsApp appears to be testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with users in India and some other markets.

techcrunch.com

Meta trials its AI chatbot across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger in India and Africa​

Manish Singh, Ingrid Lunden/ 2:24 AM EDT•April 12, 2024

Comment

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Meta has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger users in India and parts of Africa. The move signals how Meta plans to tap massive user bases across its various apps to scale its AI offerings.

The social media giant has been scrambling to roll out more AI services in the wake of big AI moves from other major tech companies, OpenAI and more.

Meta announced plans to build and experiment with chatbots and other AI tools in February 2023. India, where users have recently started noting the appearing of the Meta AI chatbot, is a very important market for the company: It is home to more than 500 million Facebook and WhatsApp users, making it Meta’s largest single market.

Developing markets, where smartphone users are growing faster than developed markets like the U.S. (where growth has plateaued), are also a big target for Facebook to try out more services to engage audiences. Users in Africa are also reporting signs of Meta AI appearing in WhatsApp.



Meta confirmed the move in a statement. “Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in varying phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Meta unveiled Meta AI, its general-purpose assistant, in September 2023. The AI chatbot is designed to answer user queries directly within chats as well as offer them the ability to generate photorealistic images from text prompts. In the case of Instagram, there’s evidence it’s also being used for search queries.

Meta has been somewhat late to the game for building and rolling out AI tools to its users. In part, its teams assumed that generative AI tech was not quite ready for prime time. OpenAI clearly proved that wrong, putting MetaAI on the back foot.

“The availability of ChatGPT somehow captured the attention and enthusiasm of the public,” said Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner who is Meta’s chief AI scientist, speaking earlier this week at an “AI Day” that the company organized at its offices in London. “What was surprising to people like me about ChatGPT was not the technology or the performance of the system. It was how much interest it gathered from the public. That surprised everyone. It surprised OpenAI, too.” Meta, he explained, thought that AI chatbots, based on its own efforts to launch them, “were not particularly welcome… in fact, some of them were trashed by people.” Now, he described the company, and the wider tech community, as “more open, and more comfortable with releasing models.”

And that’s what Meta is doing now. More pragmatically speaking, though, there are three reasons why Meta may be forging ahead with its AI strategy.

First, for user retention (users now expect to see and want to use AI tools in their apps; if Meta doesn’t offer them the worry is that those users will move away).

Second, for investor retention (investors want strong earnings, sure, but in tech they also want to see signs that Meta is committed to backing and building what many believe will be the next generation of computing).

Third, for its own pride (it’s been setting the pace for so much in areas like mobile apps, social media and advertising for the last decade, and it has outsized talent on its bench, including the celebrated AI academic Yann LeCun. Is it really going to jump the shark and miss all of this?!).

Instagram and WhatsApp’s massive global user base, boasting billions of monthly active users, to be sure presents Meta with a very unique opportunity to scale its AI offerings. By integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp and Instagram, the Facebook-parent firm can expose its advanced language model and image generation capabilities to an enormous audience, potentially dwarfing the reach of its competitors — at least on paper.

The company separately confirmed earlier this week that it will be launching Llama 3, the next version of its open source large language model, within the next month.



The story was updated with more detail and to note that Meta is testing also Meta AI across Instagram and Messenger alongside WhatsApp.