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SOCIABLE: META BRINGS ADVANCED AI CHATBOT TO ALL OF ITS APPS

- BY: ANDREW HUTCHINSON

Meta is making a bigger move to challenge Openai and others within the generative AI space.

“Sociable” is the latest commentary on important social media developmen­ts and trends from industry expert Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today.

With major investment in AI, and signi@cant 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 @rst added it, back in 2017.

No, this isn’t the @rst time that Meta’s tried to give people an Aibased

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.”

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