Facebook mother Meta has created a new production team to integrate hip technology into products such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
That writes CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post. ‘Initially, we want to focus on building creative and expressive tools. In the longer term, we can also develop AI personas to help people. The team has to work across the different groups to devise and integrate ‘text experiences’ (in WhatsApp and Messenger) and image services (such as filters on Instagram and new advertising formats).
In practice, this means that Meta is jumping on the bandwagon of generative AI, the technology that powers chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators like Stable Diffusion. The step comes a few months after those two technologies were released and received high praise. Since then, Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI to bring the chatbot to Bing and the company’s office programs. Google, meanwhile, has announced its language algorithm, Bard.
Meta seems a bit more careful to jump on the bandwagon in this regard, but the company says it has long been working on its own language robot, LLaMA. The algorithm was made public last week. In this case, it is a language generator that you cannot chat with, like ChatGPT.
The focus seems to be mainly on academic research, and universities, NGOs and laboratories can freely use the algorithm. However, judging by announcements about Zuckerberg’s “personas,” Meta may also hope to introduce chatbots and similar assistants.
