Meta announces AI chatbots with ‘personality’

Meta has announced a series of new chatbots to be used in its Messenger service.

The chatbots will have “personality” and specialise in certain subjects, like holidays or cooking advice.

It is the latest salvo in a chatbot arms race between tech companies desperate to produce more accurate and personalised artificial intelligence.

The chatbots are still a work in progress with “limitations”, said boss Mark Zuckerberg.

In California, during Meta’s first in-person event since before the pandemic, Mr Zuckerberg said that it had been an “amazing year for AI”.

The company is calling its main chatbot “Meta AI” and can be used in messaging. For example, users can ask Meta AI questions in chat “to settle arguments” or ask other questions.

The BBC has not yet tested the chatbot which is based on Llama 2, the large language model that the company released for public commercial use in July.

Several celebrities have also signed up to lend their personalities to different types of chatbots, including Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner.

The idea is to create chatbots that are not just designed to answer questions.

“This isn’t just going to be about answering queries,” Zuckerberg said. “This is about entertainment”.

According to Meta, NFL star Tom Brady will play an AI character called ‘Bru’, “a wisecracking sports debater” and YouTube star MrBeast will play ‘Zach’, a big brother “who will roast you”.

Mr Zuckerberg said there were still “a lot of limitations” around what the bots could answer.

The chatbots will be rolled out in the coming days and only in the US initially.

Mr Zuckerberg also discussed the metaverse – a virtual world – which is a concept that Mr Zuckerberg has so far spent tens of billions of dollars on.

Although Meta had already announced its new virtual reality headset, Quest 3, the company gave further details at the event. nom générique de atorvastatine

Meta’s boss described the headset as the first “mainstream” mixed reality headset. Cameras facing forward will mean the headset will allow for augmented reality. It will be available from 10 October.

The firm’s big, long-term bet on the metaverse still appears yet to pay off, with Meta’s VR division suffering $21bn (£17bn) in losses since the start of 2022.

The Quest 3 came after Apple entered the higher-priced mixed reality hardware market with the Vision Pro earlier this year.

Mat Day, global gaming strategy director for EssenceMediacom, said Mark Zuckerberg had “reinvigorated” the VR sector.

“Meta’s VR roadmap is now firmly positioned around hardware priced for the mass market. This is a stark contrast to Apple’s approach which is aimed at the high end tech enthusiast,” he said.

Meta’s announcement came on the same day as rival OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed creator of ChatGPT, confirmed its chatbot can now browse the internet to provide users with current information. The artificial intelligence-powered system was previously trained only using data up to September 2021.

Apple to buck layoff trend by hiring UK AI staff

Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook said the firm wants to hire more staff in the UK, in contrast to redundancies seen across the tech sector.

He said the company wants to take on more staff to work in artificial intelligence (AI).

It comes a day after Fortnite-maker, Epic Games, announced it was cutting 16% of its workforce.

Big firms including Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft have cut tens of thousands of jobs since 2022. minoxidil 2 pour femme prix maroc

Mr Cook has been critical of the trend of tech layoffs and in May, he called it a “last resort”.

Instead, he told the PA news agency when asked about AI and jobs in the UK: “We’re hiring in that area, yes, and so I do expect [investment] to increase.”

Companies are pouring money into AI. Amazon announced an investment of up to $4bn (£3.3bn) in San Francisco-based AI firm Anthropic on Monday.

That followed Microsoft’s multibillion dollar investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI in January.

Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan said Apple’s decision was “another vote of confidence in our burgeoning tech sector”.

“Apple’s ongoing investment in brilliant British talent highlights our global credentials as both an AI and technology superpower,” she wrote on X, the microblogging site formerly known as Twitter.

Antony Walker, deputy chief of techUK, the industry association, said: “The transformative nature of AI will certainly boost staff headcount in AI businesses over the next couple of years.”

But he added: “In the long term, the skills need of the AI-powered economy of the future is harder to predict. That is why businesses and government should work together on a long-term strategy that puts training in digital skills and lifelong learning at the core.”

Meanwhile, Tim Pullan, CEO of ThoughtRiver, which provides AI for legal professionals, said he thought the global economy was at the start of “an AI-driven revolution”.

“It’s vitally important that the UK is at the forefront of this transformation,” he said.

“As a country, we have huge potential to grow as an AI superpower, and I’m sure this is the start of a trend which will see more and more companies looking to take advantage of the UK’s deep tech expertise, and the UK benefiting from the investment and innovation that this will bring.”

Mr Cook said AI was behind several prominent features on Apple devices, such as software that detects if a person has fallen or been in a crash, as well as more commonly-used tools such as predictive typing.

“It’s literally everywhere on our products and of course we’re also researching generative AI as well, so we have a lot going on,” he said.

Generative AI – artificial intelligence which can create media based on text prompts – continues to be a target of investment for big firms despite widespread concerns over its impact of copyright, or ownership.

That is because the software “learns” by analysing a massive amount of data often sourced online and people are concerned it draws on their copyrighted work.

It has led to high-profile lawsuits in the US, with authors George RR Martin and John Grisham suing OpenAI over claims their books were used to train the system