Meta merges AI teams to work on suspected chatbots

Meta will merge several internal AI teams to implement chatbots, Instagram filters and advertisements, among other things, in its apps. 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 that is intended to create texts or images. Zuckerberg says the company wants to make “creative and expressive tools” in the near term, without specifying what that means. Meta previously said that it was working on ‘ChatGPT-like features’ in Instagram and WhatsApp.

In the long term, 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 they also include services that can create images and videos for, for example, Instagram filters and ‘new advertising concepts’. According to Axios the team is led by Ahmed Al-Dahle who previously worked at Apple for years. The team falls under Chris Cox, the CEO at Facebook.

Although details are vague, it appears 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 releases updates; Last week Meta made its own language model called LLaMA public. Last year, the company did the same with a machine learning model.