If you thought all the hype around ChatGPT over the past 10 months was a lot, then get set for that same level of artificial intelligence and knowledge to become commonplace in some of the world's most used apps – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
Meta, the company that owns those apps, held itsannual Connect conference this morning, announcing new products and software to the developer community and wider user group from its headquarters in Palo Alto California.
While much of the initial hype around the event focused on the company's "mixed reality" goggles – the new Quest 3 headset was announced with fast improvements to power, performance and usability, including plenty of subtle jabs at Apple's expensive Vision Pro headset which is yet to make it to market – the real guts of today's news centred on artificial intelligence.
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Perhaps capitalising on the year of AI we've seen, Meta spent very little time talking about the Metaverse, a term and concept which literally changed the name of the company not so long ago, and far more talking about their work in the field of AI.
The company say they have been working on a large language model – the back-end computing which enables the human-like conversational question-and-answer interactions we've seen with AI during the past year.
Soon, Meta AI will launch and instead of being a new website to go to, like Chat GPT where you can ask questions and refine your work, Meta AI will be built into Meta's existing chat platforms, Messenger, Instagram Direct and WhatsApp.
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You can have a one-to-one chat with Meta AI to ask for recipe advice or get answers to your burning questions, answered thanks to a partnership with Microsoft and Bing Search.
Or, you can summon Meta AI within an existing chat group you might have. If you're having an argument with mates about a certain historical event, just ask Meta AI to solve that argument once and for all.
This normalisation of the interaction with AI is a powerful transition from the "lab" to the "street" for such an advanced technology.
And people on the street will be talking to Meta AI too - thanks to the new Meta and Ray-Ban smart glasses, users will be able to talk to Meta and get an answer spoken to them through the glasses.
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In addition to this over-arching broad AI assistant, Meta will launch a range of more specific AI personas in different fields like travel, sports and cooking.
Interestingly, for a computer-generated personality, Facebook has chosen to use celebrities like Tom Brady, Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg as the "face" of these AI personas.
These chatbots, along with new image generation capabilities which will turn your imagination into a literal image, will launch over the weeks and months ahead across Meta platforms.
