Meta's AI Integration: Enhancing Visuals and Conversations Across Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp

0:00So the first thing I want to talk about here is the fact that Meta is coming up with several new AI driven bots across its suite of messaging apps including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. And this new offering, which is currently in beta and it's available to select users in the U.S., including essentially has an AI assistant named Meta AI that comes really close to mimicking existing chatbots like ChatGPT and AnthropicsClaud2. This is very, very interesting. Essentially, they're building into your personal text messaging or whatever ChatGPT. Now, this is interesting because, of course, we've seen something very similar out of Snapchat, who has MyAI, but that's just, you know, that's directly an API on top of OpenAI.

0:46So I'm inclined to be a little bit less impressed with what Snapchat's doing because it looks like Facebook here is, and, you know, Meta is doing something completely new with their own technology, which is really impressive. So all of this was unveiled today at, or yesterday actually, at Meta's annual Connector Developer Conference. And Meta AI is designed to essentially assist in planning trips, answer general knowledge questions, even searching the web. And this is going to be really interesting because ChatGPT took this feature away, the web search, that they just added back a few days ago.

1:16But here we have Meta doing it. And, you know, if you're wondering how they're going to do this whole web search thing, they're actually partnering with Microsoft's Bing for real-time answers. This is kind of interesting because, like, on the one hand, people are like, what? I thought, you know, Microsoft and Bing had this special partnership with OpenAI because they invested, like,$10 billion into them. But it's interesting because Microsoft, in that investment, I think subsequently has kind of said, like, look, we made this big investment. We made this big play. We hope they're the winner. But there's a very good likelihood that other tools emerge the winner in this space other than ChatGPT.

1:48so it looks like they're not really tying themselves down to one specific partnership they're hoping to win they're kind of playing in a lot of different fields and allowing their technology to be used for a lot of different reasons and of course a big part of their whole business model is increasing usage of Microsoft's Bing you know they're kind of fighting with Google over there and so I think for them they're kind of excited to have another avenue that's going to generate you know more traffic for Bing specifically and it's kind of interesting because I just feel like the way the tech landscape is i would be surprised if i saw like zuckerberg and meta go do like a partnership with google or something especially with uh you know i don't know bard and some other things so very interesting but bing is now being uh integrated into into this whole thing and ceo mark zuckerberg revealed that meta ai is slated for um integration into meta's recently announced quest 3 vr headset um so that's gonna be another thing that is happening and this whole new AI assistant appears to be Meta's second attempt at a virtual assistant.

2:47So this is following the somewhat failed experiment with M, which was a limited release, partially human-aided virtual assistant from like years ago. So M was only ever available to about 2 ,000 people living in California, and it suffered from development neglect, I think, never actually really got off the ground or scaled in any way. However, Meta AI seems poised for a wider rollout. I think obviously one of the big problems with M that they had in the past was, you know, the fact that it was like partially a human virtual assistant answering questions. So now that you actually can automate this whole thing and roll it out to hundreds of millions of people, I think obviously it's a lot more viable of a solution to a platform like Meta with billions of users.

3:29So unlike its predecessor, M, which involved human intervention for completing tasks, Meta AI is completely automated and it's running on a custom made large language model. As we know, you know, Meta is quite a pioneer in the LLM space. They've been working on this for a long time. They've done a lot of open source projects. And so I think the model has been trained to give very concise answers and can even refer back to previous conversations. So Meta didn't just stop at Meta AI. Also yesterday, the company announced the rollout of a series of AI characters. So these are chatbots designed to mimic personalities and celebrities.

4:07Now, if you know me, you've heard me talk a little bit about character AI. And this is like, it's kind of funny because by web traffic, character AI, or I think maybe mobile traffic, it's like the second most used chatbot tool behind OpenAI's ChatGPT as far as iOS downloads in the US. and um i just think it's super funny essentially like character ai lets you make different like personalities and uh you can chat with them right like leonardo da vinci or einstein or something meta is doing a little bit different and i think they're going more for like modern day personalities so it's designed to mimic people like kendall jenner duane wade mr beast paris hilton charlie d 'amelio and snoop dogg with a bunch more to come and these chatbots compete or complete with, you know, have a bunch of profile images that can either be illustrated or real life.

4:58And they're going to stay on Meta's messaging platforms. So interestingly, as users engage with these avatars, the characters will animate in response to the conversation. This is going to be very interesting to see how that works. I believe I even saw a news article that said for this whole project, they had like Mr. Beast come into the studio and like film video of him because, you know, they're doing these like animations and stuff. So very, very interesting. And obviously these are actually in collaboration and partnership with these influencers, unlike, you know, something like Character AI.

5:25I think it's just people that are making kind of these like person these like, you know, they're making these fake people that you can chat with. So very, very interesting. I think while the potential application for Meta's new chatbots are quite interesting, some people say they don't come without challenges. Meta revealed that it had spent 6 ,000 hours identifying problematic use cases and testing the models internally before making them public. And the company also claims to have developed technology for flagging content that goes against its policies and has restricted web searching capabilities to only Meta AI.

6:00So furthermore, Meta has opened its new chatbot features to researchers through a bug bounty program. This is something that Meta does a bunch that I do think is good like i think they're quite aware of like the hacker community and whatnot so i think it's good they focus on that on the business front meta launched ai studio which is a toolkit to help companies build their ai chat bots for facebook instagram and messenger so initially in alpha ai studio this is the second big thing that was announced here um it's called ai studio and it aims to let brands create bots that reflect their values and improve customer service experiences so the primary use case is kind of like that they're really targeting are e-commerce and customer support.

6:40So it's very interesting. So support these kind of business focused endeavors. Meta plans to release a sandbox tool allowing anyone to dabble in creating their own AI. So this sandbox will eventually be integrated into Meta's metaverse platforms like Horizon Worlds for powering, you know, NPCs across various metaverse experiences. So although Meta is, and okay, one thing I do want to note on that that I think is very interesting is platforms like Steam right now have a policy where they don't want any AI on their platform. And I think maybe some of it's for copyright issues. I'm not sure. But in any case, I've seen a whole bunch of news stories about people, you know, trying to use AI to make these NPCs, these, you know, non-player characters.

7:20You know, it's like the guy behind the bar table that you ask a question. He tells you to go a place in the video game. Steam, if you try to use AI or ChatGPT to come up with just like a conversation from this guy, Steam was like banning people's entire projects not even just like not allowing them to push an update but just banning them because it wasn't allowing AI so what's really interesting to me here is that meta on focusing on their metaverse and some of the games there is specifically like trying to build this technology in which I think a lot of people want to see so it's going to be very interesting to see how that kind of rolls out although meta is optimistic about you know its AI capabilities there are definitely some challenges I think the large language models powering these chatbots have been known to kind of exhibit biases and occasionally refer to inaccurate things or fabricate information with meta AI and AI studio so the company seems to be you know really focused on advancing the field but is also going to need to it's also going to have a pretty high bar of public and technical scrutiny so I think as these chatbots services roll out the real tests will be how well they adapt to and meet the complex needs and expectations of you know users and we're going to kind of look at something similar to what happened with Snapchat to see how this rolls out.

8:30But I think given Meta's kind of promise for a broader release, I don't think we're gonna have to wait long to find out. And, you know, I did see a demo of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg talking about this. It was really interesting. He specifically said, like, you're not, you're not going to have to just use, like, a specific chat. Like, on Snapchat, you have the my AI friend or whatever thing, like, and you can chat with AI there. This isn't going to be just that on Meta's platforms. You can actually invoke or summon the ai like in a conversation with a friend if you use like the backslash imagine which is kind of funny because they just stole that straight from mid-journey like whatever um it's actually able to generate images so they have their own image generator which is going to be really cool and like so you could be like literally in a conversation with a friend they say something funny i don't know you want to make a meme or whatever and so then you just say like i don't know make a meme of like a surfboard on top of a car flying through the sky by going down a wave and you know you say imagine first and then meta will be able to generate that image right there so you kind of custom images i think it's going to be kind of fun to be honest in conversations to be able to do that like imagine mid journey was just like built in so to your conversations with your friends because meta kind of has a monopoly on the whole like you know chat thing when when they got like um you know instagram dms uh facebook messenger and whatsapp they really have a huge part of the chat market so i think this is actually gonna be way bigger than something like Snapchat.

9:52In addition to this, I think you can invoke the AI in conversations with your friends. So if someone says something and you want to like, I don't know, you want to be that annoying person that has to fact check them right there, you can summon the AI to settle a debate or whatever. In any case, I think it's going to be really interesting. And honestly, I do think this is a fairly relevant AI release. It's a big use case. It's a lot of people are going to be working with AI here. And I think what we're going to see is in the next, you know, year or so, AI is going to be so deeply integrated into everything we do.

10:20It's going, this is a completely new revolution that is about to change everything. So very excited to continue to follow.