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With major investment in AI, and significant resources at its disposal, Meta’s 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 Meta’s 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 Meta’s main apps (i.e. not Threads as yet), you’ll have access to Meta’s generative AI chat engine, where you’ll be able to pose conversational queries, directly in the app.
As explained by Meta:
“Built with Meta Llama 3, Meta AI is one of the world’s leading AI assistants, already on your phone, 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 get things done, learn, create and connect with the things that matter to you.”
So it’s essentially ChatGPT in Meta’s apps, which will enable you to pose queries to Meta’s advanced AI engine in-stream.
As you can see in this example, using the new chat option within IG chat, you’ll be able to search the web for relevant info, adding more context to your discussions.
Which could be helpful, but then again, it wasn’t when Meta first added it, back in 2017.
No, this isn’t the first time that Meta’s 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:
“It felt like an amazing resource to have at my disposal, and yet in practice I almost never knew what to do with it.”
I would guess that this new feature will likely suffer the same fate, but Meta’s sure that with its new, super-powered Llama 3 engine driving this new chatbot option, it’ll actually be far more useful this time around.
Indeed, the new Llama 3 model, according to Meta, is “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”
“We’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.”
The more powerful Llama model will make Meta’s AI chatbot better than ChatGPT, and every other competitor in the market, which Meta’s 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.
You’ll even be able to animate those visuals (to a degree) with additional prompts.
Meta’s 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 you’re seeing.
Which, again, replicates what its M chatbot did, and really, overall, I don’t 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 it’s hugely valuable, but I know that it’s not, because again, Meta’s 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 don’t actually add much to the general user experience.
Meta’s could be different, particularly because it’s 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?
We’ve 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, I’m 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 we’re getting them either way, despite users not being interested in the past, and despite the rising issues that Meta’s already having with digitally generated images.
Meta’s 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.
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