Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for AI isn’t a single chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude; he instead envisions as many chatbots as there are Meta users, each infused with unique personalities and likenesses.
At the 2024 SIGGRAPH conference on Monday, Zuckerberg told Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about Meta’s new AI studio, released the same day to U.S. users. The AI studio allows anyone to create an AI chatbot modeled after themselves or a fictional character — with no code required.
“We want to empower all the people who use our products to basically create agents for themselves,” Zuckerberg explained.
The chatbots work across Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and the web, and Meta has a handbook that guides interested AI creators through the process of making one.
Huang said he was “super excited” about creator AI and called it a “home run idea.”
He stated that the power to create AI now extends to the hundreds of millions of small businesses that use Meta’s products.
“We eventually want to be able to pull in all of your content and very quickly stand up a business agent and be able to interact with your customers and do sales and customer support,” Zuckerberg said.
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He positioned the AI studio as the first step towards custom AI chatbots that could help small businesses and creators interact more personally with their communities. The AI personalities would be trained on the material needed to properly represent the business.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Meta’s AI studio had bots like GreenThumbGuru, which focused on gardening tips, and The Sassy Psychic Priscilla, which advertised “real talk, no fluff,” at the time of writing.
Zuckerberg said that one of the top use cases so far for Meta AI has been emotional support. People are using AI to think through difficult social situations, like asking their manager for a promotion.
This is where the flexibility to create different AI personalities comes in handy compared to a unified AI model, according to Zuckerberg.
“It’s all part of this bigger view we have that there shouldn’t just be one big AI,” Zuckerberg said. “We just think that the world will be better and more interesting if there’s a diversity of these different things.”
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Zoom CEO Eric Yuan had a similar outlook on the future of AI.
In a June interview, Yuan told The Verge that his vision was to have an AI version of himself attend meetings, act as a personal assistant, and send him summaries of meetings. Custom AI bots have the potential to cut the five-day workweek down to four or three days, he said.
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