When Meta released its Meta AI chat tool last year, it left a lot to be desired. In some cases, it returned less desirable results compared to Open AI’s ChatGPT-4, and its slow performance annoyed some users. But with the help of Llama 3, everything changed.
Meta on Thursday launched a major update to Meta AI, including a new standalone website for using the AI tool. The company is also incorporating Meta AI into the search functionality of Instagram, Facebook, and messaging platforms Messenger and WhatsApp. And with the help of two new Llama 3 models released at the same time as the Meta AI update, Meta promised much better performance, intelligent image generation, and faster performance.
Logitech’s free AI Prompt Builder is also incredibly useful.My usage is as follows
The stakes are high. With competition from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and many others, Meta competes in a highly competitive market. However, the company believes that by integrating Meta AI into its hugely popular platform, billions of people will be able to easily use its AI tools without relying on other tools. And it seems.
Whether that will happen remains to be seen. But I’ve spent some time using Meta AI both in the browser and on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram (Meta AI also works on WhatsApp, but it’s not available on my account at the time of writing) did). And while I’m not convinced that this will become a mainstream AI platform in the future, it’s certainly a useful option as it provides easy access to the social media platforms we use throughout the day.
Read on to learn more about our time with Meta AI and how it worked across platforms.
Meta AI in the browser
Meta AI is available in your browser at Meta.ai, the tech giant’s new site. Logging in to Facebook before using this tool improves your overall experience, including generating images, saving conversation history, and syncing with Messenger, but you can also use it without logging in.
While using Meta AI in the browser, I found it to be very fast, answering questions and providing data very quickly. Interestingly, I found it particularly useful as a browser for local news and local insights. When I asked for the best heating and air conditioning vendors in my area, I got solid results. And when I asked him to summarize the recently passed New York state budget in five sentences, he immediately provided a helpful summary.
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Since I was logging in to Meta AI with another service, I decided not to log in with a browser. When I tried to get it to create an image of a dog with a baseball bat, it said that image generation was only available if I was logged in. So please keep that in mind when using it in a browser.
Please also note that if you use Meta AI without logging in, Meta will ask you to log in to your Facebook account. If you decline, you will be asked to confirm your date of birth before entering your first query.
Still, overall it works very well in the browser, giving results at least as good as ChatGPT-4.
Meta AI for Facebook and Messenger
Meta AI is fully integrated into Facebook, including both search and news feed. I wasn’t able to test the News Feed feature, as it wasn’t available on my account at the time of this writing, but I was able to access Meta AI through both Facebook and Messenger.
The mobile experience is similar to the browser version, with the ability to ask questions about your region and make more advanced queries. When you ask Meta AI about news or other events, we search on Google to find the results for you. It then lists the sources used to provide those results, so you can see where the information came from and decide whether the source is trustworthy.
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This time I was able to use an image generator and tried some strange concepts to test its quality. Overall, it performed very well, although image generation with Meta AI took a little longer than I expected. However, I was able to add text and animate the photos.
The image generation worked well, but the images I created were far from believable, a feature that Meta needs to work on if it wants to match OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator.
Instagram Meta AI
It wasn’t until I tried Meta AI on Instagram that I felt that the experience of Meta AI being fully integrated into the app made perfect sense and was something that many people would want to use.
Instagram had Meta AI running in search, so I immediately used it to find the latest Reels about one of my favorite hotels in New York City. It went very well. I then tried some of the queries I typed into the browser version and again got fast and accurate results. Creating images still took a little longer to deliver, but it was easy to share to stories and feeds.
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During testing, I found myself using Meta AI to not only search other Instagram accounts, but also to answer questions and find local eateries. It made sense to make it easily available in the Instagram search tool, which I use frequently. And this could replace other large-scale language models as well as parts of local Google search.
That said, I was surprised that when I asked Meta AI to show me my friends’ recent reels and posts, I got no results. So if you plan on using this as a tool to view content from your friends on Instagram, look elsewhere.
final thoughts
It is difficult, if not impossible, to predict how meta-AI will perform in such a crowded AI market. However, the advantage is that you can immediately run queries while already using the app. We may not be that different from competing LLMs, but we are no longer behind. And that, combined with its easy access, makes it a real player in the AI space.
