Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for AI is not a single chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude; instead you see as many chatbots as Meta users, each with a different personality and image.
At the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference on Monday, Zuckerberg told Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about the new Meta studio for AI, which was released on the same day for US users. AI Studio allows anyone to create an AI chatbot modeled after themselves or a fictional character – with no coding required.
“We want to empower all the people who use our products to become agents,” explained Zuckerberg.
Chatbots work across Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and the web, and Meta has a manual that guides interested AI creators through the process.
Huang said he was “very excited” about the AI creator and called it “a practical idea for the home.”
He said the power of creating AI is now being extended to the hundreds of millions of small businesses that use Meta’s products.
“Ultimately we want to be able to pull all your content and quickly set up a business agent and be able to communicate with your customers and do sales and customer support,” Zuckerberg said.
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He positioned the AI studio as the first step toward custom AI chatbots that can help small businesses and creators engage more with their communities. AI people will be trained in the things necessary 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 Sassy Psychic Priscilla, which advertised “real talk, no fluff,” at the time of writing.
Zuckerberg said one of the top use cases so far for Meta AI has been emotional support. People use AI to think through difficult social situations, such as asking their boss for a raise.
That’s where the flexibility to create a different AI personality comes in handy compared to the integrated AI model, according to Zuckerberg.
“It’s all part of this big idea that we have that there shouldn’t be one big AI,” Zuckerberg said. “We just think that the world would be better and more interesting if there was a diversity of these different things.”
Related: Mark Zuckerberg Says Apple’s ‘Blocked’ Platform Is ‘The Main Reason’ He’s Pushing Open Source AI.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan had a similar view on the future of AI.
In an interview in June, Yuan told The Verge that his idea was to have an AI version of himself go to meetings, be a personal assistant, and send him summaries of meetings. Custom AI bots have the potential to reduce the five-day work week to four or three days, he said.
