Meta wants to get in on the AI chatbot action – but not for Facebook

Menlo Park, California - Amid the ongoing sensation surrounding ChatGPT and the boost it has given Microsoft, Facebook parent group Meta says it, too, now wants in on the AI hype.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company is releasing an AI-based language model, but has not announced plans to develop AI for WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company is releasing an AI-based language model, but has not announced plans to develop AI for WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.  © Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP

Meta's artificial intelligence-based language model, a technology called LLaMA, is being released in order to support AI researchers in their work, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says.

Unlike Google and Microsoft, however, Meta is not announcing plans to develop an AI for users of its major platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

A Meta spokesperson told the financial wire Bloomberg that the system is not currently used in Meta products such as Facebook or Instagram. Instead, it will be made available to researchers specializing in AI, Zuckerberg said on Friday.

"LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures. Meta is committed to this open model of research and we'll make our new model available to the AI research community."

Chatbots like ChatGPT have been trained using massive amounts of text to mimic human speech, and succeed in producing usable texts largely by guessing which word should come next.

At the same time, tests of ChatGPT showed that the software often answers questions with incorrect information and that it can even become abusive in dialogue with users.

ChatGPT was developed by the start-up OpenAI and released at the end of last year. This encouraged first Google and now Meta to tell the public more about what they have done in previous years in the area of language model development.

Microsoft, meanwhile, entered into a billion-dollar pact with OpenAI, and has succeeded turning its search engine Bing, long dwarfed by Google Search, into a potential major rival.

Cover photo: Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP

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