Meta AI: When quantity matters more than quality

“AI has identified you ” With this message, on July 28, my mother shared what would be her first experience with a Artificial intelligence .

His first question was: What do you know about Axel Christiansen? gave him a brief description which he quickly shared with me. The AI ​​identified me as an author who has written for various media outlets and my main topics are phones, photography, and board games.

About my brother, he told me: “knows nothing ” This simple anecdote made me think what you actually achieve The company of Mark Zuckerberg to become a relevant player in the – apparently – increasingly important world of artificial intelligence.

On July 24, an update of WhatsApp increased to Meta-AI for a multitude of new markets, including Chili . And not realizing it is practically impossible. With a permanent icon on the home screen and the function integrated directly into the message search bar, Meta’s strategy seems clear: whether by mistake or curiosity, those who have never had an interest in using traditional customer AI as ChatGPT , Gemini either Co-pilot , now try it .

And from this point of view, The Trojan horse sent by Meta is a perfect excuse to have a good base of potential users for the future something that now seems to be what matters most in defining what will happen in the future, in which dominating the AI ​​market can be so powerful as was the case at the time to dominate the search market, for example.

To give you an idea: WhatsApp has 2.7 billion active users every month, while ChatGPT , 180 million . A much greater scope than he also aspires to. Microsoft with Co-pilot considering that the user base of Windows 11 That’s 400 million people. .

But what is the current use of Meta AI? The real answer concerns the place from where you access it .

Meta AI is based on artificial intelligence known as Call whose version 3.1 is the one released in this global release. The difference between Llama and others – like ChatGPT, Bing or Gemini – is that It is an open source AI which in addition to guaranteeing that its cost is “free” (considering that Meta’s collection of data about us can be considered free), allows many other projects to use this model for their custom functions .

But that’s not what matters to end users. Ultimately, whether it’s open or closed, whether it uses our data or not, or whether it’s paid or free, what we care about most is what it’s actually used for. And I think that, at least for now, the potential for using Meta AI in apps like WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook Messenger (where it’s also available in case you haven’t noticed) It’s quite limited or rather unimaginative. .

Currently, Meta’s AI has two main functions: answer questions and generate images . The generation of images is nothing that has not been seen and in fact, a long time ago, WhatsApp already integrated the function of creating personalized stickers with AI, and if you have not seen any yet, it is because they clearly do not work well or do not work well. under a rather humorous and contingent logic with which we use stickers.

However, it is Use it as an assistant that answers questions, commands and more -by text message- where this AI should work best . In fact, there’s a reason why the way to interact with it is done precisely in a WhatsApp chat window. But Meta doesn’t do a great job of showing you its true potential.

Let’s look at the things that, for example, Meta’s AI advises me to search for in order to learn how to use it: “Cook the perfect steak,” “Bohemian decorating tips,” “Imagine a dinner party on Mars,” “Tell me a sports joke,” or “Little-known TV shows.” And while many of these questions can be answered with some degree of certainty, Its intention seems to be nothing more than wanting to replace the searches we do on Google, but in a WhatsApp window. .

And of course, in a way, you could say that by doing this, it does its job well, because not only does it use the data it already has in its database, but it can also collect information from the Internet, cite it, and provide more or less updated data. For example, when asked about Francisca Crovetto note that he won a gold medal at Paris 2024 and if you ask for a list of cameos dead Pool And wolverine mentions them all (even if it is just a reference from an internet link).

But when I was asked to explain what happened in the last elections in Venezuela gave me data from 2018, when Maduro’s rival at that time was Juan Guaidó. When I clarified that I was referring to those that occurred in 2024, he apologized but pointed out that they took place in April of this year and with the same participants: Guaidó and Capriles.

Why sometimes you have updated information and other times not, it’s a mystery but by having these errors, what it does is that, in its main function, Meta AI fails to present itself as an alternative to trust . And, in the context of an app like WhatsApp, Meta could have fulfilled many other interesting functions that other AI models currently perform.

For example, It is striking that he only interacts through text and not with voice. . Wouldn’t it be great if Meta AI could make a text transcription of one of those long audios that many people send? Or better yet, summarize it .

You can also make summaries of what was discussed in a group that you have not joined for a long time, learn to prioritize notifications or transcribe voice calls as it happens today on Android and it will also happen in the next iOS update thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

And further, There are a number of differences between the products available in our region and in the United States. . Mark Zuckerberg showed on his Instagram how, thanks to a series of photos taken by the cell phone camera, Meta’s AI can integrate you into the photos it generates, so by asking it to imagine you as an astronaut, it will do it using your face. And yes, it may seem very frivolous and not very useful, but it is still a function that can be exercised in some parts of the world and not in others.

I also think that many of the things the app promises, It delivers them in an unintelligent way, despite being an AI. . For example, one of the prompts it gives you as an example is to be able to create a playlist for exercising. And when you ask, it only gives you the name of the artists and the song, but nothing else. The moment you provide a link to be able to export that information to Spotify or Apple Music (or whatever service Meta is interested in), that day it will be a contribution.

The same thing happened to me with a function with which you can search for thematic reels. If you search for reels on WhatsApp, it gives you a text that is useless, but if you do it on Instagram, it works. And given that there at least the applications are all Meta, well, it could at least generate a link to open Instagram, right?

However, I could write a lot of things that I think Meta AI does worse than the competition, but at least in these first few weeks, wins the battle overwhelmingly . It is already full of memes asking questions to see their answers, and although they are often falsified, it is a tool that is used. And that, in the long run, as animals of habit that we are, could be the advantage that Meta needs to establish itself as a synonym for AI. Because how many of us go to Gemini instead of Google? Or how many have installed the ChatGPT application to be able to chat with it?

And if Meta managed to convince someone like my mother, who is one of those who thinks AI is scary (partly because of me, since I should never have shown her how I was able to imitate voices), to use it for something like this simple how to find information about your children, that the potential adoption is already a triumph .