Sociable: Meta brings advanced AI chatbot to all of its apps

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

Published April 19, 2024

By 

Andrew HutchinsonContent and Social Media Manager

First published on

“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 significant 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.

 

Post by @mosseri

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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 first added it, back in 2017.

No, this isn’t the first time that Meta’s tried to give people an AI-based 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.