After the ChatGPT boom, everyone wants to jump on the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon. And Meta was not going to be less than Microsoft, Google or Spotify. The company led by Mark Zuckerberg has just created a new group focused on the development of this technology, which would end up being integrated into applications as popular as WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger.
Zuckerberg talks about a short-term job that would consist of “building creative and expressive tools.” In the long term, Meta’s efforts will focus on developing generative AI technologies, to be integrated into WhatsApp and Messenger chat. For Instagram, the changes would go through the creation of creative filters and new ad formats.
Meta closely observes the last steps of his rivals. First, Microsoft announced the integration of ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot powered by OpenAI, into its Bing search engine. An ordeal to its direct competitor Google, which responded with the presentation of Bard, an AI based on its LaMDA linguistic model and that feeds on information from the web to offer fresh and high-quality answers.
The announcement of the Meta Zuckerberg company has not been long in coming. The CEO explains that he is employing part of his staff to develop these technologies, which will have various applications in his products.
“We are exploring experiences with text (like chat on WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like Instagram creative filters and ad formats), and with video and multimodal experiences. We have a lot of foundational work to do before we get to the truly futuristic experiences, but I’m excited for all the new things we’ll build along the way,” he said in his post.
But Meta’s aspirations go further. In the future, it will focus on creating ‘AI people’ that can help users use its services.
The company recently introduced its own machine language AI model, which works similarly to ChatGPT and is called LLaMA, an abbreviation for ‘Large Language Model Meta AI’. Meta commented that, at the moment, LlaMA is a research project in development and that he hoped to continue training her for the next few months.
Furthermore, one of the drawbacks is that, for now, it will only be available under a non-commercial license both for researchers and for entities and organizations affiliated with the public administration, academia and civil society.
The project is ambitious, but Zuckerberg acknowledges that it will be slow and take time to develop: “We have a lot of foundational work to do before we get to the truly futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all the new things we’ll build along the way.”
