Meta’s AI assistant launches on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp

Meta is making a significant stride in the AI space this week, expanding the reach of its AI assistant across all of Metaverse’s social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

The company’s site heralded the announcement alongside the development of the flagship artificial intelligence model Meta Llama 3.

Meta’s new AI assistant

At the heart of the Meta AI assistant is the powerful Meta Llama 3, a large language model (LLM). This cutting-edge technology is the engine that drives the prompts users ask of the assistant across the Meta social channels.

“With our most powerful large language model under the hood, Meta AI is better than ever. We’re excited to share our next-generation assistant with even more people and can’t wait to see how it enhances people’s lives,” the Meta announcement boasted.

We reported that Meta had tested the assistant in India and certain parts of Africa. Users in these regions had flagged across social media, that they had spotted the AI elements appearing on the company’s apps like WhatsApp. This appears to have been a soft launch of the features before the global announcement this week.

The Meta AI whatsapp bot is very disruptive. The AI wars have begun. The Internet is changing rapidly. pic.twitter.com/3PUsq6LwJO

— Munya Bloggo (@MunyaBloggo) April 19, 2024

The “Ask Meta anything” prompt will be available across all of the social media giant’s apps and provide optional information to guide users’ decision-making. This feature can be used to run queries past the assistant. It will produce information like restaurant recommendations with specifics, answer technical queries, and suggest images for furniture and household items.

The company’s “Imagine feature” also generates AI-prompted images in real-time across all of its apps, showcasing the assistant’s advanced capabilities. These images can also be animated with a prompt and converted into a GIF to send across Metavers’s many social channels.

Meta also announced that a browser-based version of Meta AI will be available for those using their computers. The release said, “We’re rolling out meta.ai (the website) today. Struggling with a math problem? Need help making a work email sound more professional? Meta AI can help! And you can log in to save your conversations with Meta AI for future reference.”

The company believes this is the most robust free AI assistant on the market and will be deploying it across more than a dozen countries. This is a pretty powerful step forward for Meta, which is in hot competition with Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for the top spot in AI.

Image: Meta.