Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now

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2024-04-19 13:30:06

By Alex Heath , a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He has over a decade of experience covering the tech industry.

To that end: the Meta AI assistant, introduced last September, is now being integrated into the search box of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It’s also going to start appearing directly in the main Facebook feed. You can still chat with it in the messaging inboxes of Meta’s apps. And for the first time, it’s now accessible via a standalone website at Meta.ai.

For Meta’s assistant to have any hope of being a real ChatGPT competitor, the underlying model has to be just as good, if not better. That’s why Meta is also announcing Llama 3, the next major version of its foundational open-source model. Meta says that Llama 3 outperforms competing models of its class on key benchmarks and that it’s better across the board at tasks like coding. Two smaller Llama 3 models are being released today, both in the Meta AI assistant and to outside developers, while a much larger, multimodal version is arriving in the coming months.

The goal is for Meta AI to be “the most intelligent AI assistant that people can freely use across the world,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells me. “With Llama 3, we basically feel like we’re there.”