Meta is merging AI teams to work on suspected chatbots

Meta will merge several internal AI teams to implement chatbots, Instagram filters and advertisements in its apps, among other things. The team will focus on generative artificial intelligence.

The plans are vague for now, but ceo Mark Zuckerberg writes on Facebook that it is setting up a new “top-level product group” at Meta that will deal with generative artificial intelligence. That is AI intended to create texts or images. Zuckerberg says the company wants to create “creative and expressive tools” in the short term, without specifying what that means. Earlier, Meta said it is working on “ChatGPT-like functions” in Instagram and WhatsApp.

In the long run, the company wants to build “AI personas,” which is another word for chatbots. These are intended to be built into services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, but it also concerns services that can create images and videos for Instagram filters and ‘new advertising concepts’, for example. According to Axios the team is led by Ahmed Al-Dahle who previously worked at Apple for many years. The team falls under Chris Cox, the top boss at Facebook.

Although the details are vague, it seems that Meta will eventually want to compete with the current proliferation of chatbots in the tech world. In addition to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, major tech companies such as Microsoft and Google recently released their own chatbots. Meta is probably trying to piggyback on that. The company has been working on its own AI models for years and regularly updates them; Last week, Meta released its own language model called LLaMA. Last year, the company did the same with a machine learning model.