Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, launched its own chatbot based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Meta AI provides an alternative to products like Openai’s Chatgpt and is setting out to offer interaction tailored to attend to different interests and solve specific tasks.

Zuckerberg Unveils Meta AI Chatbot, AI Personas at Meta Connect Event

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of the U.S. tech giant’s new AI-powered assistant in a keynote speech at the Meta Connect developers conference on Wednesday. The chatbot will compete against the already established player in the space, Chatgpt, and other offerings like Google’s upcoming Gemini.

It became clear from Zuckerberg’s presentation that Meta’s approach to the development of AI differs from the rest of the industry in that the company does not believe in a “singular superintelligence” for everyone. In its view, most people would rather have a number of AIs for different purposes or even make their own. He elaborated:

We are building a platform for creating AIs that can help you get things done or just have fun. People will be able to interact with these AIs across the whole Meta universe of products.

Meta aims to enable users to chat in its messaging services like Whatsapp and Messenger with the AIs that will also have profiles on Instagram and Facebook to offer even richer interaction. While the platform will be opened up for developers to create more AIs in the future, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta has already built a bunch and it’s starting to roll them out in beta.

A media report in early August unveiled that the firm was preparing to launch multiple AI-powered chatbots dubbed “personas.” Zuckerberg now demonstrated some of them, starting with Meta AI which he described as the “basic assistant.” Built on the in-house large language model Llama 2, it can also tap into real-time, broader information thanks to a partnership with Microsoft and Bing Search.

Users will be able to invoke the Meta AI assistant in any chat, including group chats. Besides answering questions and responding to various requests in text, Meta AI will also be able to generate images using Meta’s new image generation model called Emu that has been built in the chatbot.

The other “a bit more fun” AIs that Meta has been training are focused on more specific areas such as cooking, traveling, or editing, for example. The chatbot personas are played by real-life celebrities like rapper and producer Snoop Dogg (Dungeon Master), legendary NFL quarterback Tom Brady (Bru), MMA champion Israel Adesanya (Luiz), and Paris Hilton (Amber).

Meta AI has been made available to a limited group of Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, and Whatsapp users in the United States, starting from Sept. 27, and will be integrated into Meta’s smart glasses and Quest 3 visual reality headset next month.

Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, the Microsoft-funded AI research lab Openai announced that its Chatgpt has been enabled to browse the internet and provide users with current information. Previously the chatbot was limited in its answers to data available before September 2021. Among other recent developments in the increasingly competitive sector, Amazon revealed this week it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, the AI firm behind the generative AI assistant Claude.

Which AI chatbot do you think will be the most popular a year from now? Tell us in the comments section below.