Just days after Meta unveiled LLaMA — its large language model for researchers — CEO Mark Zuckerberg is back with consumer-facing news. On Monday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta is creating a new top-level product group focusing on generative AI. One of the group’s objectives is to build AI personas for all of Meta’s products, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Prepare to talk to AI in Instagram and beyond
Here’s the message that Zuckerberg shared on Facebook regarding the new product group:
We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area. We’re starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products. In the short term, we’ll focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways. We’re exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences. We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.
Based on the CEO’s statement, it doesn’t sound like we should expect to see Meta’s AI personas any time soon. That’s probably for the best, considering how choppy the rollout of Microsoft’s Bing chat has been and the early flub from Google’s Bard AI.
Meanwhile, some of these “creative and expressive tools” might see the light of day in the coming months. Zuckerberg didn’t provide many details about what those tools would be, but we imagine they might be in line with popular AI profile picture generators and similar apps.
