MARK Zuckerberg has announced a major change to all his social apps in a bid to overtake ChatGPT.
Billions of users across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger will start to notice an AI assistant popping up prominently.
Meta AI was first announced last September but it’ll soon appear within the search box of the tech giant’s four big apps.
“We believe that Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use,” Zuckerberg, 39, said in a video.
Much like ChatGPT, the AI assistant can do things like answer questions or create images for you at the click of a button.
For example, you could ask it for restaurant recommendations or help planning a holiday.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its ChatGPT service has been the star of AI since it burst onto the scene in late 2022.
Google also has its own AI project, Gemini.
But in an unexpected twist, Meta will use results from the two rivals’ search engines within the chatbot for “real-time knowledge”.
Meta AI is being rolled out in a number English-speaking territories from today – but not the UK.
Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, said the company is “still working on the right way to do this in Europe” where privacy rules are stricter.
“The goal eventually is to help take things off your plate, just help make your life easier, whether it’s interacting with businesses, whether it’s writing something, whether it’s planning a trip,” he said.
One advantage Meta has pitched is that users will no longer have to bounce between apps and can instead acquire information in a single destination.
You’ll also encounter Meta AI when you’re scrolling through your Facebook Feed with a button to ask about posts that take your interest.
And when generating images you can even ask the tool to animate it so you get a fancy GIF.
Do people really care about AI chatbots?
Analysis by Jamie Harris, Senior Technology and Science Reporter at The Sun
The obsession among tech companies for a slice of the AI buzz continues.
And now it’ll be right within some of the most popular apps pretty much everyone uses.
Mark Zuckerberg is hoping to win people over by emphasising that Meta AI is free whereas ChatGPT has paid options for faster response times and priority access to new features.
But do people really care about the fuss around AI tools?
Most people I know dabbled with ChatGPT for a laugh at first and haven’t looked at it again since.
Yet, Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI – the company that runs ChatGPT – claimed in November that the service is used by 100million people on a weekly basis.
Meta has been involved in AI for sometime behind the scenes but this latest move puts it right at the forefront so it’ll be interesting to see how people respond.
The feature is made possible with Meta Llama 3, the firm’s latest large language model that can quickly churn through information.
Zuckerberg added: “I don’t think that today many people really think about Meta AI when they think about the main AI assistants that people use.
“But I think that this is the moment where we’re really going to start introducing it to a lot of people, and I expect it to be quite a major product.”
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Source: Zuckerberg steps up ChatGPT rivalry with a big change for WhatsApp and Facebook
