Where is Facebook's chat bot?

ChatGPT is introducing ads. Maybe that will work out for them or maybe it won’t, but Facebook hasn’t really responded yet. Facebook is one of two major players in the digital ad world. Facebook along with Google are estimated to collect 35-40% of total global advertising. Preventing a third player from emerging should be a top priority for Facebook.

Facebook has produced a similar product, MetaAi, but news of this app gaining traction is hard to find.

One issue could be that the website is backed by the Llama model which has been criticized by the industry for being weak. The question is, does having a strong model really matter for creating a competent consumer chat app? I don’t really think so. Perplexity developed a strong LLM powered search app with the models available over a year ago. While smarter models would of course be useful for software or other advanced tasks, weaker models could be just fine for the search/summarization focused consumer use cases.

Llama was one of the early model to publish open weights. Now there are a handful of other stronger open weight models. Facebook could power their ChatGPT clone with a smarter cheaper open weight model. I wonder what their strategy behind Llama is.

The biggest problem for meta.ai to solve is distribution. How can they drive users to their product and away from ChatGPT? Since ChatGPT is adopting ads, it makes sense for Facebook to maintain an ad-free experience in the LLM app. Further, they should continue to drive usage from the other Meta properties (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram) and promote sharing media created by the app. The last thing I would consider is a name change. “Meta AI” is difficult to say and hard to remember.