Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing Meta AI, its large language model-driven chatbot, with WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger users in India and parts of Africa. The move signals how Meta plans to leverage massive user bases across its various apps to scale its AI offerings.
The social media giant is trying to develop more AI services in the wake of big AI moves by other big tech companies, OpenAI and others.
Meta announced plans to build and experiment with chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools in February 2023. India, where users recently started to note the appearance 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 US (where growth has flatlined), are also a big target for Facebook to test more services to attract audiences. Users in Africa are also reporting signs of Meta AI appearing on WhatsApp.
Meta confirmed the move in a statement. “Our productive AI-based experiences are in various phases of development, and we’re testing a number 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 users’ queries directly within conversations, as well as offering them the ability to create photorealistic images from text messages. In the case of Instagram, there are indications that it is also used for search queries.
Meta was somewhat late to the game in building and releasing AI tools to its users. In part, her teams assumed genetic AI technology wasn’t quite ready for prime time. OpenAI clearly proved this wrong, putting MetaAI on the back foot.
“The availability of ChatGPT kind of got the public’s attention and excitement,” said Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner who is Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist, speaking earlier this week at an “AI Day” that organized by the company 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 garnered from the public. This surprised everyone. It also surprised OpenAI.” Meta, he explained, believed that AI chatbots, based on his own efforts to launch them, “were not particularly well received…in fact, some of them were destroyed 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 realistically speaking, however, there are three reasons why Meta can move forward 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 deliver, they worry those users will drift away).
Second, to retain investors (investors want strong earnings, sure, but in tech they also want to see signs that Meta is committed to supporting and building what many believe will be the next generation of computing).
Third, for its own pride (it has regulated so much in areas such as mobile applications, social media and advertising in the last decade, and has great talents on its bench, including the famous AI academic Yann LeCun. It is really going to jump the shark and I’ll lose all of that?!).
Instagram and WhatsApp’s massive global user base, with billions of monthly active users, certainly offers Meta a very unique opportunity to scale its AI offerings. By integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook’s parent company can expose its advanced language model and image creation capabilities to a massive audience, potentially reducing the reach of its competitors — at least on paper.
The company separately confirmed earlier this week that it will release Llama 3, the next version of its long-language open source model, within the next month.
The story has been updated with more details to note that Meta is also testing Meta AI on Instagram and Messenger alongside WhatsApp.
