Meta scales up its AI chatbot experiment in India and Africa
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After officially entering the AI game in September 2023, Meta just scaled up its AI chatbot experiment.
Some WhatsApp users have been able to play around with the company’s new AI assistant for a while now, and Meta’s AI upgrade was first introduced in beta in November last year. More functionalities appeared on users’ search bars later in March. However, the trial was restricted to people in the US in a limited capacity.
Now, people in India and parts of Africa have spotted Meta AI on WhatsApp. Speaking to TechCrunch, the company confirmed that it plans to expand its AI trails to more users worldwide and integrate the AI chatbot into Facebook Messenger and Instagram, too.
More platforms, more users
“Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in varying phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The move perfectly illustrates the company’s will to compete with AI’s bigger players, most notably OpenAI and its ChatGPT-powered tools. What’s more, India is the country worldwide with the most Facebook and WhatsApp users. WhatsApp monthly usage is also reportedly high in African countries, such as Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.
To check if you’re a chosen one, you should update your WhatsApp for iOS or Android app to the latest version directly from the official app store. Meta AI will appear for some selected users who have their app set to English on a rolling basis.
Meta starts limited testing of Meta AI on WhatsApp in different countries!Some users in specific countries can now experiment with the Meta AI chatbot, exploring its capabilities and functionalities through different entry points.https://t.co/PrycA4o0LI pic.twitter.com/BB2axOGnEjApril 12, 2024
Designed to reply to users’ queries and generate images from text prompts, the Meta AI chatbot is also landing on Facebook Messenger and Instagram on a limited capacity across the US, India, and a few more selected countries. On Instagram, the plan is also to use the feature for search queries—TechCrunch reported.
These signs of Meta AI expansion aren’t happening in a vacuum, either. A few days back, the company announced plans to release AI models with “human-level cognition” capabilities.
“We are hard at work in figuring out how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan . . . to have memory,” Joelle Pineau, the vice president of AI research at Meta, told the Financial Times when announcing the new Llama 3 model.
The choice is now yours if you want to help Meta accelerate its work towards an even more powerful AI—but do we all want that, really?—or, remain a silent and skeptical spectator.
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