In an ambitious move to redefine your relationship with procrastination, Meta has now granted its AI assistant the ability to browse the internet in real time across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, presumably so you can continue to scroll through reels without being burdened by such quaint activities as “looking things up.”
This upgrade, part of the company’s newly announced “Meta AI” rollout, was unveiled with an appropriately theatrical flourish during CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at Meta’s Connect conference held in good old Menlo Park. The assistant, powered by Meta’s new Llama 3 AI model, now has access to real-time search capabilities through Bing and can even pull up information from social media platforms that aren’t exclusively cat video repositories.
Zuckerberg, clearly pleased with his shiny new digital helper, explained that the assistant is “free, real time and state of the art,” which is exactly what most of us say about ourselves on dating profiles before reality sets in. The integration will appear as a ghostly search bar hovering just above the message bar in Meta’s apps, ensuring that your AI assistant is always one accidental tap away from becoming your new best friend or possibly your most informed acquaintance.
Meta AI can now perform everything from generating text to answering questions with up-to-date information, provided that information is Bing-worthy and not something as outdated as human decency on the internet. The assistant is also being embedded into Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, because nothing says cutting-edge futurism quite like talking to your sunglasses during brunch.
Not to be outdone in the AI arms race, Meta is also launching a dedicated website for its assistant, predictably located at meta.ai. If you needed one more bookmark to ignore while still googling “how to boil water,” your prayers have been answered.
Meta’s latest move signals a full-speed-ahead approach to integrating AI across its empire of apps, which means that while the assistant will help you Google a recipe, it cannot stop your aunt from commenting “yum!!” thirteen times under your photo.
Just when you thought you could rest your browser tabs, Meta pulled you back in with digital sunglasses and good intentions.