SAN FRANCISCO: Social media giant Meta has unveiled its first standalone AI assistant app, directly challenging OpenAI’s ChatGPT by offering users a dedicated platform to access its generative artificial intelligence models.
Announced on Tuesday, the new app is designed to act as a personal AI companion to over billion users of Meta services, primarily accessible through voice interactions tailored to each user.
“A billion people are using Meta AI across our apps now, so we made a new standalone Meta AI app for you to check out,” the company’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Instagram.
Zuckerberg said the app “is designed to be your personal AI” and could be primarily accessed through voice conversations, with the interactions personalised to the individual user.
“We’re starting off really basic, with just a little bit of context about your interests,” the CEO said.
“But over time, you’re going be able to let Meta AI know a whole lot about you and the people you care about from across our apps, if you want.”
Embracing the company’s social media DNA, the app features a social feed allowing users to see AI-made posts by other users.
“We learn from seeing each other do it, so we put this right in the app,” Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said Tuesday as he opened the tech titan’s LlamaCon developers’ gathering devoted to its open-source AI model.
“You can share your prompts. You can share your art. It’s super fun.”
The new application also replaces Meta View as the companion app for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, allowing conversations to flow between glasses, mobile app and desktop interfaces, the company said.
“We were very focused on the voice experience; the most natural possible interface,” Cox said.
‘Like a phone call’
Meta also added an experimental mode designed to let the AI app engage in human-style conversations with users.
“You can hear interruptions and laughter and an actual dialogue – just like a phone call,” Cox said.
The executive explained that the feature isn’t able to search the web, so asking about topics such as sports teams or the Papal conclave was off the table for now.
Users will have the option of letting Meta AI learn about them by looking at their activity on their Instagram or Facebook accounts.
“It will also remember things you tell it like your kids’ names; your wife’s birthday, and other things you want to make sure your assistant doesn’t forget,” Cox said.
The release comes as OpenAI stands as a leader of straight-to-user AI through its ChatGPT assistant that is regularly updated with new capabilities.
Meta touted advantages of Llama at the one-day event aimed at getting developers to embrace its AI model that it describes as open source.
Open source means developers are free to customise key parts of the software as suits their needs.
OpenAI’s closed model keeps its inner workings private.
“Part of the value around open source is that you can mix and match,” Zuckerberg told developers tuned into LlamaCon.
“You have the ability to take the best parts of the intelligence from the different models and produce exactly what you need, which I think is going to be very powerful.”
