SINGAPORE – A new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant has popped up on popular messaging tool WhatsApp and social media platforms Instagram and Facebook, greeting users in the form of a blue ring where the search bar sits.
The assistant is Meta AI, tech giant Meta’s take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard) chatbots. The roll-out puts the chatbot front and centre for billions of Internet users globally.
The Straits Times answers questions about how Meta AI works and learns from user data, and whether it listens in on users’ private conversations.
1. How does Meta AI work?
Users can ask Meta AI text-based questions or ask it to generate images as it is a generative AI tool similar to ChatGPT and Gemini.
The free-to-use chatbot is built on a large language model (LLM) called Llama 3, a computer program trained on huge datasets of text and code from the internet and other sources, which allows them to understand how language works.
Users can access Meta AI on a dedicated webpage to code, summarise text and draft essays, among other tasks.
Meta has also pushed the AI across Facebook in its search bar to allow users to search the internet using natural language, and to prompt the chatbot to suggest similar content.
Meta AI is also integrated into WhatsApp to respond to questions, or roped in to WhatsApp conversations to help brainstorm ideas and perform searches when they type “@MetaAI” into the text bar of a conversation.
