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Meta’s Newest AI Investment
With enormous AI investment and resources at its disposal, Meta is now making a larger push to compete with OpenAI and others in the generative AI area.
Users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger can now use Meta’s next-level generative AI assistant directly in their app’s search box.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
As shown in this example given by Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, anytime you go to search in any of Meta’s primary apps (not Threads yet), you’ll have access to Meta’s generative AI chat engine, where you’ll be able to pose conversational queries straight in the app.
As described 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 demonstrated in this example, the new chat option within IG chat allows you to search the web for relevant information, giving context to your discussions.
Which could be useful, but it wasn’t when Meta first introduced it in 2017.
No, this is not the first time Meta has attempted to provide users with an AI-powered assistant in-stream; its M bot previously provided nearly identical functionality.
Nobody cared.
Meta discontinued M in 2018, and while the business stated at the time that it was pleased with what it had learned from its M experiment, usage was extremely low, and it never seemed to acquire traction as a valuable add-on option.
As reported 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.”
New Updates
We suspect that this new function will follow the same fate, but Meta is confident that with its new, super-powered Llama 3 engine powering this new chatbot option, it will be significantly more useful this time around.
Indeed, Meta describes the new Llama 3 model as “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 sophisticated Llama model will make Meta’s AI chatbot superior to ChatGPT and every other rival in the market, which Meta hopes will lead to more people using it. It can also generate images in-stream, morphing in real-time as you type.
You’ll even be able to animate the images (to some extent) using additional prompts.
Meta is also releasing a new meta.ai website, which will allow you to access its chatbot from your desktop PC, as well as Meta AI prompts in-feed to help you find more depending on what you’re seeing.
Which, once again, repeats what its M chatbot achieved, and altogether, I don’t see a lot of desire for these new capabilities, which will also continue to divert users away from the true goal of social apps.
That is, true social connections.
While the most recent generative AI tools are incredible in their ability to give us with advanced features that can help us find things online, create new material, and augment our activities, many of the actual outputs are not revolutionary.
And do you really need this in the stream?
For example, how difficult is it to search Google and then return, and how much value does having this information quickly add? And you might tell me that it’s quite valuable, but I know that it’s not, because again, Meta’s tried this before, and nobody used it.
Most of the generation AI capabilities being introduced to social apps at the moment feel forced, as if the platforms feel obligated to include these tools in order to compete with other AI providers. However, I would say that they don’t significantly improve the overall user experience.
Theirs may be different, especially because it is so significantly more strong than other possibilities now available. But will it be that big a deal?
And is it a good thing if people can create material in real time and start sharing it?
We’ve already witnessed a torrent of phony AI photos on Facebook, continuously luring many users into liking.
Incorporating generative AI more directly appears to be much more troublesome on this front, and I’m not sure if it will be as important or beneficial as they believe.
However, Mark Zuckerberg is enamored with AI and is eager to incorporate more of these technologies into his programs.
So we’re getting them regardless, despite users’ lack of interest in the past and Meta’s ongoing troubles with digitally generated photos.
The new AI search features are accessible today to customers in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
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