Photo illustration: Intelligencer
Meta has an idea. Instead of leaving the app, why not stay there and chat with a bot? Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced updates to Meta’s AI model, making it, in some ways, the most capable model in the industry. insisted. He outlined his company’s plans to pursue AGI (artificial general intelligence) and made some more specific predictions. Rebuild with Ray-Ban Meta. ”
Maybe so! But for now, the company has other things in mind. Meta deploys chatbots across the most popular apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Users may encounter chatbots that speak to them when they comment on Facebook posts, are tagged in group messages, or offer suggestions in their social feeds. Like ChatGPT, you can chat directly. Generate images and write messages. Just as Microsoft and Google have built his AI assistants into their productivity software, Meta has installed helpers in various social contexts. It will be very interesting to see if and how people use them in these contexts, and Meta will soon find out.
The move has been described as both wise and desperate. Is Meta trying to play catch-up, pouring money into trends and imposing half-baked technology on users? Or is Meta now the de facto leader in AI, with capable models, an associated hardware business, and more users than anyone else? Like the AI models themselves, such claims is difficult to benchmark. All players in AI are racing in the same direction toward an unspecified destination where they, or at least their investors, believe great riches await.
But in real life, Meta’s AI tells a more mundane story about its intentions.place largely Users are more likely to encounter meta chatbots largely Currently in the context of a search.
Meta AI is also available for search on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Access real-time information from across the web without jumping back and forth between apps. Let’s say you’re planning a ski trip in a Messenger group chat. With Messenger Search, you can ask Meta AI to search for flights from New York to Colorado or find less crowded weekends without leaving the Messenger app.
In reality, this is a far-reaching and notable development. The boxes used to search for other people (pages, groups, places, topics) are also now between chatbots and search engines. It will be as follows.
Photo: Screen Cap
Photo: Screen Cap
Similar to ChatGPT, you can ask questions about what you want and the responses will be synthesized for you. In contrast to other chatbots, Meta’s AI is similar to the results you get from AI-powered search engines such as Perplexity and Google’s Search Generative Experience. I often return things. Links from the web. When it works, the intent is very clear. These features are aimed at reducing the need to leave Facebook or Instagram, rather than offering you anything else to do within it. Instead of switching away from Instagram and searching for something on Google or tapping on the web for a while, you can just tap the search bar in Meta and get the answer to your question right there.
This isn’t a simple case of meta maximizing engagement, but that’s certainly part of it. Deploying this kind of AI is expensive to train and uses a lot of computing power to run, but at this scale Meta will almost certainly cost a lot of money, which is why OpenAI offers users similar tools. We are charging a fee of . This is a prediction that the web (openly accessible websites that exist outside of meta-walled gardens) will decline, become harder to browse, and cease to be central to most people’s online lives. It is also a plan for the future. Currently, smartphone users go back and forth between the app and her web browser, and use her web browser within the app. Links provide connective tissue between apps that wouldn’t actually communicate with each other without them, and the web is a common resource that most apps reference, at least to some degree. Here, Meta offers a preview of a world in which the web is reduced to a source for summarization and reference, a set of data that is viewed by machines on your behalf rather than something you view.
This isn’t great news for the web or the various parties currently contributing to it.Indeed, AI companies’ pervasive and greedy approach to all existing and available data sources makes such data difficult to obtain and its creators less likely to create it or at least share it. (depending on the AI results of the currently constructed meta) from Google and Bing). Don’t get ahead of yourself. The first thing I did when I discovered this feature on Instagram was type in “New York.” A list of accounts and some search suggestions appeared, including, oddly enough, “New York fries.” near me. ” I decided to check it out:
Photo: Screen Cap
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t actually want fries. Elsewhere, Meta’s AI offers parenting advice on her Facebook page, claiming to be the parent of a gifted and disabled child attending a New York City public school.
Zuckerberg is probably right that by the end of the decade we’ll be wearing Ray-Bans and talking to AI every day. But now meta expects us to have those conversations, even if we don’t like, need, or understand what we hear in response. We’re stuck testing AI, and we’re also stuck testing ourselves.
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