Meta doesn’t want to fall behind in the AI race

When we think about Meta, a lot of things come to mind; AI isn’t really one of them. The company hasn’t made a big public show about its AI ambitions. However, it’s a major tech brand, so news about some AI products was bound to come. Well, according to The Wall Street Journal (via The Byte), Meta is working on a powerful new AI to rival ChatGPT.

We know Meta as the Metaverse company, and it is still trying to make that a thing. However, the whole AI renaissance happened under the company’s feet, so it needs to adapt to the changing tech landscape.

Meta is working on a powerful new AI

Most people don’t know this, but Meta actually unveiled a powerful chatbot before ChatGPT hit the market. A few months before ChatGPT, Meta released Blender Bot 3. This, just like ChatGPT was a chatbot that would respond to your input and try to speak to you as though it was a human. As you can imagine, Blender Bot was miles behind ChatGPT.

Now, the company is working on something new. It’s no mystery that Meta is angling this as a competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM (large language model). However, one thing to note is that this might not serve the same purposes. ChatGPT can be used as a business solution for companies, but it’s also a tool for average users. The report states that Meta’s new AI might only offer solutions for companies.

At this point, it’s hard to tell what the company is going to do, as information on it is scarce. It’s still too early to know what the company plans on doing with its AI. What we do know is that Meta plans on it being much more powerful than its current LLAMA-2 model.

The company will have some competition

The team working on developing this AI was assembled by none other than Mark Zuckerberg himself. It was put together earlier this year as a response to ChatGPT’s rising stardom. While the company’s been working on the model for some time, we shouldn’t expect it to start training the AI model until early next year.

This means that Meta’s going to be pretty far behind in the AI game. OpenAI is working on improving GPT-4, but other companies like Apple and Google are also working on their AI. Meta could be in for quite the AI bloodbath.

However, Meta’s business structure isn’t built on AI as much as OpenAI’s or Google’s. So, if the company gets lapped in this AI race, it shouldn’t affect it too much.