Meta is working on Generative AI experiences for WhatsApp, Instagram: Zuckerberg

Facebook parent Meta Platforms is setting up a new product team to build new experiences around messages, images, and videos for WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger using generative artificial intelligence (AI), the underlying technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday. 

“We’re starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. 

Generative AI allows computers to learn the pattern in a database and use it to generate similar content. Some of the techniques used for it are generative adversarial networks (GANS), transformers, and variational autoencoders. ChatGPT, Bing’s new AI experiences, and Google’s Bard are examples of transformers. 

A transformer is a neural network that can understand the link between two sequential data such as words in a sentence. 

Zuckerberg further said that the short-term goal of the new product team is 

Build creative and expressive tools. He added that the long-term goal is to develop AI personas. “We're exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences,” said Zuckerberg. 

He noted that the team has a lot of foundational work to do before they can pursue the long-term goals of building futuristic experiences. 

Since the release of Bing AI experiences and the announcement by Google to integrate Bard chatbot in search, several companies have announced plans to leverage their underlying technology to offer new experiences to their customers. 

For instance, Snap Inc announced on Monday that it is releasing an AI chatbot, called My AI, on Snapchat. It will be powered by ChatGPT and released first to Snapchat’s paid users, which will be later expanded to all. Similarly, Twitter CEO Elon Musk Elon Musk is planning to set up a new research lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, according to a report in the Information. Microsoft is also planning to offer Bing AI experiences in Skype group chats. 

Integrating ChatGPT-like services can help drive engagement on social media platforms and allow companies to add new sources of revenue, which has taken a hit due to the economic downturn, reduction in ad spending by companies, and new privacy tools that make target advertising difficult. This has forced them to even cut jobs. In November, Meta slashed more than 11,000 jobs, while Twitter fired around 3,500 workers. 

Digital ads are a major source of revenue for most social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.