Get Ready to See More AI Chatbots on Facebook, Instagram

Not to be outdone by Microsoft or Google, Facebook parent company Meta is concentrating the company’s resources on developing its own AI-powered chatbots. 

“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced(Opens in a new window) on Monday. 

Meta—which also runs Instagram, WhatsApp, and the VR division formally known as Oculus—already has several teams devoted to generative AI, or AI-powered programs that can pump out text, images, and videos. Now the company is coalescing the teams into one group that’ll focus on bringing “delightful experiences” to Meta’s various apps and services, Zuckerberg says.  

“In the short term, we’ll focus on building creative and expressive tools,” he adds. “Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways.” 

The effort sounds like Meta’s own version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 could end up arriving as various features for the company’s products. Zuckerberg adds: “We’re exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences.”

The news arrives days after Meta released its own AI-powered large language model, dubbed LLaMA, to researchers. The computer model is capable of powering a chatbot that might be able to rival ChatGPT. In addition, the company has developed an AI program that can generate life-like, but fictitious videos based on mere text prompt from the user. 

However, the tech giant has refrained from releasing the generative AI products to the public when it’s clear the same technologies could be easily exploited to spread online disinformation. Over the past year, Zuckerberg’s company has also been famously busy on developing a VR-powered metaverse, so far with lackluster results.

Meta will have to play catch up to Microsoft, which has already been previewing its ChatGPT-powered Bing to the public, though it has imposed limits on it following negative news headlines about its unhinged behavior during long conversations.

Google’s Bard AI, meanwhile, is only available to a small group of testers at this time, but Google intends to release it more broadly in the coming weeks.