Meta launches its ChatGPT rival on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger

The AI craze is currently in full swing, with variable results across form factor borders. However, for the most part, customers who want to take advantage of its full potential have had to pay a premium. Meta AI made its debut, pulling power from the Llama 3 model. It's free (for the time being), and it has the potential to be one of the first truly mainstream AI products.

That's partly because Meta AI is already making its way into some of the world's most popular platforms, with billions of users. The English-language versatile AI tool is now available on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.

Meta AI is expanding beyond the United States and now serves consumers in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Meta has implemented its AI as a distinct chatbot entity in each of the aforementioned apps. It can also be utilized in WhatsApp Group chats by using the @MetaAI keyword in the message field. It may be found in the DMs area of Instagram and Messenger.

Meta AI, like any other internet-connected chatbot, may retrieve summary information from the web. However, Meta's deployment across its social and messaging apps saves users the time and effort required to conduct a web search. In fact, you may summon it straight in a chat with another person, essentially using it as an answering machine.

In terms of web search, Meta AI appears to be able to pull results from both Google Search and Microsoft Bing. And, like the aforementioned search engines, it appears that the AI assistant will immediately answer users' questions while also displaying appropriate one-tap search result suggestions in the chat window. This approach is comparable to that of Perplexity AI and Arc Search.

For example, it can find flight and hotel information in a group conversation with friends who are planning a trip. It can also generate images in the same manner that other text-to-image AI tools such as Dall-E do. The most exciting aspect, however, is that the image changes in real time as you input or edit the description of your suggestion.

Simply open a chat with Meta AI and type the command "/imagine" in the message field. To spice things up, there's also a "animate" command that brings images to life in the form of brief animations — or, more precisely, shareable GIFs. This is a clever concept for injecting some original fun into conversations.

Facebook is expanding its social media offerings by introducing a one-tap "Meta AI" button below public postings, as well as contextual one-tap buttons that directly engage the chatbot. For example, a mushroom recipe page may have "safety tips" buttons that can open the Meta AI window with a summary wall of text about the best ways to identify and safely store mushrooms.

The best thing about Meta AI's rollout is that there are no hardware constraints or processing power benchmarks. Everything happens on cloud servers, and the functions are equally accessible in apps available all over the world. The only drawback is the language barrier, but considering Meta's recent work with big language models, it's only a matter of time until that is addressed as well.

And did I mention that it is all free? That's right. My main concern is what Meta will get out of this worldwide endeavor. Running generative AI models is one of the most expensive projects right now. Yes, Meta is not short of funds, but given the company's questionable track record with user data safety and the scarcity of high-quality AI training material, can these Meta AI interactions serve as instructive material for more advanced models?

We do not have those answers, and we cannot forecast them. However, for the time being, we must commend the firm for actually democratizing generative AI in a meaningful and widely accessible manner. This all-in-one approach to a multimodal AI tool eliminates the need for a subscription or the inconvenience of multitasking, thus convenience is also an important consideration.