Pursuant to his goal of “building the world’s leading AI,” Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that Meta AI is upgrading to Llama 3 concurrent with a rollout of its open-source chatbot across the company’s social platforms, integrating it into the search boxes atop WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. There is also a website, meta.ai, for those who prefer browser access. Reports of Meta upgrading its social AI capabilities began leaking out early last week, albeit on a more limited test scale than what Zuckerberg announced, which, excepting Threads, is cross-platform.

You’ll even be able to use Meta AI with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, CNET reports, adding that “Meta has already begun integrating AI into the smart glasses as well as making them compatible with Meta platforms like Instagram.”

In an announcement on Facebook, Zuckerberg calls the Llama 3-powered Meta AI “now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”

He adds that it includes “some unique creation features, like the ability to animate photos,” and says “Meta AI now generates high quality images so fast that it creates and updates them in real-time as you’re typing. It’ll also generate a playback video of your creation process.”

In a nod to productivity, a Meta newsroom post calls Meta AI “one of the world’s leading AI assistants, already on your phone, in your pocket for free” and explains you can use it “to get things done, learn, create and connect with the things that matter to you.”

Meta has over the years added some small business tools, and it will be interesting to see if it leverages AI to mine the workspace.

Initially, Meta AI is casting a wide net. “The AI software will become practically omnipresent — inside the news feed, in search bars and in chats with friends,” writes The New York Times, offering help with everything from planning a night out to decorating, studying for a test or exploring genealogy.

Meta AI is launching in English in 14 countries including the U.S. Although it is likely Meta AI is being tested in India, as indicated in early reports, the territory is conspicuously absent from its list of commercial deployments.

NYT describes the rollout as the first step in Zuckerberg’s 2023 promise to bring AI assistants “to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful.”

Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM watsonx, Microsoft Azure, Nvidia NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, Meta details in a blog post.

Related:
Meta Is Already Training a More Powerful Successor to Llama 3, Wired, 4/18/24
Llama 3 Launches Alongside New Standalone Meta AI Chatbot, VentureBeat, 4/18/24
Meta’s Not Telling Where It Got Its AI Training Data, Sherwood News, 4/18/24
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses Have Multimodal AI Now, The Verge, 4/23/24