Meta, in Its Biggest A.I. Push, Places Smart Assistants Across Its Apps
On a call with investors last spring, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said he believed that he had an opportunity to introduce artificially intelligent assistants “to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful.”
A year later, he is making good on his statement.
On Thursday, Meta will begin incorporating new versions of its A.I.-powered smart assistant software across its apps, which include Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook. The latest technology will be rolled out in more than a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, Singapore and the United States.
The A.I. software will become practically omnipresent — inside the news feed, in search bars and in chats with friends. People will be able to ask the assistant, Meta A.I., for help in completing tasks and getting information, such as what concerts might be occurring in San Francisco on a Saturday night or the best options for vegan enchiladas in New York.
Meta A.I. is powered by LLaMA 3, the company’s newest and most powerful large language model, an A.I. technology that can generate prose, conduct conversations and create images.
“With LLaMA 3, Meta A.I. will now be the most intelligent freely available assistant,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview. “And because we’ve reached the quality level we want, we’re now going to make it much more prominent and easier to use across all our apps.”