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Title: Meta rolls out an updated AI assistant, built with the long-awaited
Llama 3

Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:00:53 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/meta-rolls-out-an-up...

Meta just announced a major update for its AI assistant platform, Meta AI,
which has been built using the long-awaited open source Llama 3 large
language model (LLM). The company says it's ΓÇ£now the most intelligent AI
assistant you can use for free.ΓÇ¥ As for use case scenarios, the company
touts the ability to help users study for tests, plan dinners and schedule
nights out. You know the drill. ItΓÇÖs an AI chatbot.

Meta AI, however, has expanded into just about every nook and cranny
throughout the companyΓÇÖs entire portfolio, after a test run with Instagram
DMs last week. ItΓÇÖs still available with Instagram, but now users can
access it on Messenger, Facebook feeds and Whatsapp. The chatbot also has a
dedicated web portal at, wait for it, meta.ai. You donΓÇÖt need a company
login to use it this way, though it wonΓÇÖt generate images. Those recently-
released Ray-Ban smart glasses also integrate with the bot, with Quest
headset integration coming soon.

On the topic of image generation, Meta says it's now much faster and will
produce images as you type. It also handles custom animated GIFs, which is
pretty cool. Hopefully, it can successfully generate images of different
races of people. We found that it struggled with this basic concept a couple
of weeks back, as it seemed biased toward creating images of people of the
same race, even when prompted otherwise.

MetaΓÇÖs also expanding global availability along with this update, as Meta
AI is coming to more than a dozen countries outside of the US. These include
Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Pakistan, Uganda and others. However,
thereΓÇÖs one major caveat. ItΓÇÖs only in English, which doesnΓÇÖt seem that
useful to a global audience, but whatever.

As for safety and reliability, the company says Llama 3 has been trained on
an expanded data set when compared to Llama 2. It also used synthetic data to
create lengthy documents to train on and claims it excluded all data sources
that are known to contain a ΓÇ£high volume of personal information about
private individuals.ΓÇ¥ Meta says it conducted a series of evaluations to see
how the chatbot would handle risk areas like conversations about weapons,
cyber attacks and child exploitation, and adjusted as required. In our brief
testing with the product, we've already run into hallucinations, as seen
below.

Engadget/Karissa Bell

AI has become one of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pet projects, along with
raising really expensive cattle for beef in a secluded Hawaiian compound, but
the companyΓÇÖs still playing catch up to OpenAI and, to a lesser extent,
Google. MetaΓÇÖs Llama 2 never really wowed users, due to a limited feature
set, so maybe this new version of the AI assistant will catch lightning in a
bottle. At the very least, it should be able to draw lightning in a bottle,
or more accurately, slightly tweak someone elseΓÇÖs drawing of lightning in a
bottle.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-
rolls-out-an-updated-ai-assistant-built-with-the-long-awaited-llama-3-
160053435.html?src=rss

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