Meta is reported to develop its own AI search engine

Meta is developing an AI-powered search engine. The search tool would generate automatic summaries of current events and news to power an AI chatbot available on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta's chatbot answers customers' questions using web searches from Google and Microsoft Bing. However, Meta's team has been working on an internal database for more than eight months to allow the chatbot to get information without using an external search engine.

According to the source, Meta has begun compiling its own web index by deploying spiders to crawl and catalogue internet pages. The collected data will be used to train machine learning models that will return relevant results to queries about subjects, persons, and events.

Meta faces both a great potential and a huge difficulty in developing its search engine, which may make its chatbot more useful while retaining user data and interactions within its platforms. Scraping web content, on the other hand, presents substantial legal concerns about copyright and proper recompense to producers.

Meta also signed a multi-year agreement with Reuters last week. This agreement will allow Meta's AI chatbot to obtain full news stories and content from Reuters.

Other industry titans, such as Apple, OpenAI, and Perplex, are also making inroads into AI search. Apple's software updates hinted that the company may be working on developing search for its App Store. Perplexity has been sued by publishers including News Corp and The New York Times for its techniques.

OpenAI confirmed that it is developing a model dubbed SearchGPT. "SearchGPT will quickly and directly respond to your questions with up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources," OpenAI noted on its blog.