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Mark Zuckerberg says Meta now has a team building AI tools and ‘personas’

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta now has a team building AI tools and ‘personas’

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Zuckerberg says the company is building AI-powered tools for WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.

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An image showing Mark Zuckerberg
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge

Meta now has a team dedicated to building tools powered by artificial intelligence, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on Monday. This could eventually include “AI personas” designed to help people in “various ways” in addition to new AI tools across its apps and services.

More specifically, Zuckerberg says the company is working on AI “experiences” with text, such as chat with Messenger and WhatsApp, experiences with images for things like “creative Instagram filters and ad formats” as well as “video and multi-modal experiences.” According to Axios, the new AI team will be led by Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of AI and machine learning, who previously worked on Apple’s special product group.

A screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta channel post about the new team.
Mark Zuckerberg’s post about the new team.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” Zuckerberg writes. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”

As OpenAI’s ChatGPT surges in popularity, more companies, including Microsoft, Google, and now even Snapchat, are exploring opportunities in the generative AI space. Meta recently announced that it’s working on an AI language generator of its own, called LLaMA, which is geared more toward researchers rather than the general public. It also launched two AI chatbots — Galactica and Blenderbot — that weren’t exactly impressive, but it’ll still be interesting to see how Meta improves on and incorporates AI features within each of its apps.