Remember back in 2021, when Facebook went all in on the metaverse?
It even changed its name to Meta?
Well, recently, Meta has found a new fixation, AI chatbots.
Meta is trying to make chatbots kind of nearly as central to the social experience in the platform.
as the people that you actually know who exist in real life.
The real-life humans.
Yes, and that sounds a little crazy and far-reaching, except the company has said that they really are trying to level up the chatbot's capabilities and sort of not make the distinction between users of AI and flesh and blood.
Our colleague Jeff Horwitz has been following Meta's journey into creating AI chatbots.
Jeff says an important moment happened in the summer of 2023 at a hacker conference in Las Vegas.
Meta let some hackers play with its bots and got some tough feedback.
The attendees were kind of testing out a whole bunch of different chatbots and generative AI tools, kind of to see what the safeguards were.
You know, this is kind of messing around with it until it breaks type stuff.
And they came to two conclusions about Meta's bot.
The first was that Meta AI was definitely the safest.
And the second was that Meta AI was definitely the most boring.
Boring.
Staff were told that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was upset that the team was playing it too safe.
Zuckerberg wanted the bots to be engaging and realistic, and he wanted them fast.
It all came to a head last fall.
So what happened was kind of described to me as a bit of a dressing down of the senior product staff.