Meta - the parent company of Facebook - is reported to be designing AI-powered chatbots to have “humanlike” discussions with its users.
The story from the Financial Times, which Meta has not commented on, states: “...[the] social media giant is even exploring a chatbot that speaks like Abraham Lincoln and another that advises on travel options in the style of a surfer…The purpose of these chatbots will be to provide a new search function as well as offer recommendations.”
Meta suffered a difficult 2022 resulting in widespread job losses. Its recent launch of text-based app Threads was also problematic as it lost half of its users within just weeks. The alleged investment in AI may be a bid to try and retain existing users as well as lure new ones.
Meta has already created an open source AI model called Llama 2, which will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system.
In July, Bloomberg News reported Apple is also working on AI offerings that could be like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard'.
