Meta's AI Persona Revolution: Chatbots with Personalities

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1:03So today on the podcast, we're going to be jumping into some breaking news about what Meta is reportedly preparing, which is an AI powered chatbot with a bunch of different personas. We're going to be talking about what they're going to be doing with that. And we're also going to be talking about another company that has done the same thing, seeing some very astronomical results. So let's jump into it. Before we talk about Meta, I want to talk about the fact that Character AI, which is a company that essentially allows you to build a bunch of different personas, right? It's essentially being like, hey, chat GPT, act as Albert Einstein, and then you can chat with Albert Einstein or any character, any person.

1:37You can give it, obviously, a little bit more elaborate prompts. You could say, act like Albert Einstein if he only had the ability to use half of the alphabet. I don't know, something random like that. So it can kind of do these variations, and people think it's kind of fun, but the growth on this product is absolutely insane. So some people are saying that this was reminding them of Facebook and Instagram's growth, which I think is kind of interesting. But this is what you should know. Last month, it had 280 million web visits. It's growing at 60 % month over month, and it has nearly 30 minutes as the average session duration per user, which is absolutely insane to someone that has an app myself.

2:2030 minutes as an average session duration is really, really impressive. So this month alone, right, they had around 281.4 million web visits. Last month was 173 million, and the month before was 107 million. So this thing is growing very, very quickly. Now, this whole concept is kind of cool, kind of interesting. I'd be curious to see how much of it is kind of like a novelty and how much of it is going to be a really solid paradigm shift for how people are using AI. But apparently, Meta is thinking that this is a paradigm shift because what they have recently said is that they are working on a chatbot which is aimed to have a couple different personas.

3:04they'll have a bunch of different personas but you can kind of envision a chatbot which is advising you on your travel plans um and they have apparently three things that have leaked is that they have one that's like a surfer one that's abraham lincoln um and so i think this is going to be really really interesting um getting kind of these personalities out of these chatbots now i would be curious to see if meta goes full character ai and allows you to have you know thousands of ones if this is something that's going to be integrated into messenger and whatsapp as someone you might talk to, kind of how Snapchat did the Snapchat AI that you can just talk to or whatever.

3:39It's gonna be interesting. I think the game plan as they currently have it is essentially to enhance user engagement by making these AI interfaces, not only functional search and recommendation tools, but also kind of entertaining to just tinker with and play with. And on that note, it would appear like they're kind of making a play to make essentially a virtual or personal assistant, right? Similar to Google's assistant, which we know Google's completely scrapping their entire assistant and rebuilding it with to be AI instead of just, you know, programmed. I'm assuming the same thing will happen with Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.

4:15And so it may be the app that Facebook is, or Meta is actually going to be making a, kind of like an assistant play here, but you can have not just the assistant that tells you, right? Like Siri, you just get Siri's robotic female voice. imagine if you could get essentially that same thing but with a ton of different you know it's Abraham Lincoln it's a surfer your virtual assistant could be any person I think that's really really interesting and that'll be an interesting place where it goes and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if that was a really good play out of character AI right right now they have all of these different chatbots that are like talking like and chatting like a specific person but imagine what happens once you integrate the voice, right?

4:58You could get the voice of Abraham Lincoln talking to you or get someone that sounds like a surfer to respond in that way. So I think that would be a whole other really interesting set of tools. It kind of brings me back to back in the day, my Garmin GPS used to be able to select it as a British female or a male with an Irish accent. There's a few different accents you could have, and it's always kind of fun to switch them up. so your GPS was talking to you in the accent of someone from somewhere else, this is going to take that to a whole new level where you have entire personas. You know, Garmin, the new Garmin GPS of today might be a surfer from Malibu explaining how to drive wherever you're going, which could be funny or annoying, depending on how you take it.

5:43In any case, over at Meta, the people that are putting this out are kind of being a little bit tight-lipped about it when they were asked for comments. They weren't disclosing a lot. But the Financial Times, very reputable source, of course, was giving essentially some insider information they had and wrote a report on this. So I think while these chatbots hold a lot of promise and really kind of turbocharging engagement, I think they could also transform into data gold mines, right? Meta, by and large, is a very big data company. Everything they do revolves around it. So the more a user engages, the more data they're able essentially to extract and amass on a specific user.

6:22and that enables meta to essentially craft more relevant content and specifically the golden ticket is targeted ads so they essentially could have these chat bots chatting with you asking you all sorts of questions and all of that's going to put on to be put into your own profile so they can share you know so they can target you with targeted ads um and you know it's actually surprising to me that we don't see something like this out of meta we haven't seen some sort of personal assistant where you can ask it questions because this would be like in my opinion a no brainer way to to get information about what you're interested in what you're looking at in order to really essentially just grab your data and serve you specific targeted ads.

6:58As a result, I think it's almost certain that a lot of these AI-powered conversationalists are going to definitely ignite some very fresh privacy debates as Meta gets into this. So I think Meta is definitely not the first big tech company to kind of go in this area of AI-infused chatbots. But aside from Google, they're probably the one that has the most to gain from a lot of the data that they can gather. Now, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, recently let some really intriguing little snippets slip during the company's recent Q2 earnings call. He talked about the fact that AI could potentially become their assistant, coaches, or even intermediaries with business and creators.

7:39And he's forecasting kind of a fresh wave of AI powered products that could redefine our interactions across both mobile apps and what, you know, he's really focused on, which is the metaverse. So we are definitely very interested in getting more details on Meta's AI trajectory. And I think that we're going to probably be waiting until September when the Connect developer event is set to happen. happen. And I think this new development comes right off the back of Meta's recent 11 % year-over-year revenue growth, which, you know, provided some momentum for the company that previously had reported some revenue slumps.

8:14So it does seem that they are set for a very big play in AI, and this is definitely an area that we're going to be following very closely in the future.