What you need to know
- Meta is adding its artificial intelligence chatbot, Meta AI, to its four core social media apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
- Meta AI now uses Llama 3, the latest large language model (LLM) from Meta, and that results in faster image generation and other benefits.
- The chatbot will be integrated into the existing search bar of these apps, making it easy to access without needing a standalone app.
Meta is finally deploying its full arsenal of artificial intelligence features, starting now. That includes a new large language model (LLM), Meta AI integration with core apps, and a new Meta AI web client. The company launched Meta AI in September 2023, and it has since appeared in limited fashion in Meta apps and on the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Now, Meta AI will appear basically everywhere, including in the default search bars on the company's four core apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. This move alone means that Meta AI will be put in front of billions of users, at least when the rollout concludes. In addition to becoming part of the apps' search bars, Meta AI can still be accessed through app DMs, and it will also begin showing up in the regular Facebook feed.
This release of Meta AI isn't fully global yet, but it will expand beyond the U.S. for the first time. Meta is debuting the chatbot in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It'll be limited to just English at the start, but Meta plans to expand on that in the future.
Alongside the expanded rollout of Meta AI, the company revealed an open-source LLM called Llama 3, which is the successor to Llama 2. It touts that Llama 3 can beat other LLMs of comparable sizes in benchmarks and succeed in real-world applications as well. But the killer Meta AI feature is the chatbot's ability to access Bing and Google in real time to respond to requests. This could give Meta AI an edge because chatbots reliant on LLMs become outdated virtually as soon as they're released.
Meta also says that Meta AI is better at image generation, and its new trick is animation. After creating a still image, giving Meta AI a request like "animate" will turn the still into something like a boomerang GIF. It isn't quite text-to-video generative AI, but it's still a neat feature nonetheless.
Though Meta AI isn't fully released yet, there are plans for expansion already in the works. The company says it will bring Meta AI to the Meta Quest at some point, and the chatbot will presumably come to more languages and regions eventually too. You might not see Meta AI in Meta apps immediately, but a few Android Central staffers already noticed the chatbot in apps like Instagram.
Derivatives of the Llama 3 model are also in the works, including two smaller-sized variants and a larger multimodal version. If you don't want to use Meta AI in your apps, there's a new web client hosted at meta.ai.
