Meta starts testing AI chatbot on WhatsApp and Instagram in India

Meta AI will allow users to generate text, images and summarise stories

Meta is testing its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Meta AI with select users across popular social media apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram in India, the parent company of Facebook said on Friday.

The move is reflective of Meta's intention to take advantage of its massive user base across platforms to scale its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings. India is the largest market for WhatsApp with over 500 million users. 

“Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in varying phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson said.

The chatbot service from the social media giant will allow users to generate text and images, summarise stories, and help with other tasks such as proofreading, editing, and translation, among others. In September last year, the company launched Meta AI in beta as a conversational assistant for WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.

“Meta AI can give you real-time information and generate photorealistic images from your text prompts in seconds to share with friends,” read an official announcement from the company.

The chatbot will be powered by a custom model that leverages technology from Llama 2 and the latest large language model (LLM) from the company. 

Llama is Meta’s Large Language Model (LLM), which it released last year to compete with the likes of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google’s Gemini. 

For text-based chats, Meta AI will access real-time information through its search partnership with Bing and will also offer a tool for image generation to users, according to the company.

Along with Meta AI, there are 28 more AI tools that the tech giant announced last year for WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.

“Users can think of these AIs as a new cast of characters – all with unique backstories. We partnered with cultural icons and influencers to play and embody some of these AIs. They’ll each have a profile on Instagram and Facebook, so users can explore what they’re all about,” said Meta. 

Meta also unveiled its next-generation silicon chip to cater to artificial intelligence (AI) demands on Thursday. The company said the new generation of Meta Training and Interference Accelerator (MTIA) chips will be used to run ranking and recommendation models to improve content organisation on its apps and services such as Facebook and Instagram.

“This new version of MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of our previous solution while maintaining our close tie-in to our workloads. This chip’s architecture is fundamentally focused on providing the right balance of compute, memory bandwidth and memory capacity for serving ranking and recommendation models,” said the company.

WHAT’S IN A BOT

 Once fully rolled out, the chatbot will be available across Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp

 Similar to other AI chatbots, Meta AI will allow users to generate text and images, and do other tasks

 Chatbot will be powered by Meta's Llama 2 and the latest large language model (LLM) from the company

  Meta plans to roll out 28 other AI assistants in future