According to the Financial Times, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is creating a variety of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that have various persons, including the character of Abraham Lincoln.
The newspaper stated on Tuesday, citing an unnamed person familiar with the project, that the internet giant is considering the release of the Lincoln chatbot and a surfer chatbot that provides travel suggestions as early as September.
Like its peers Apple and Microsoft, Meta is aggressively concentrating on AI.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that “open source” AI is safer and more secure when the social media behemoth last month announced it would give up the code for free for its AI large language model Llama 2.
The news of Meta’s alleged plans comes as the California-based social media business battles to keep users of Threads, its brand-new platform that mimics Twitter. Threads has lost more than half of its members since it launched last month, when it attracted record numbers of new users.
An inquiry for comment from Meta did not immediately receive a response.
After a challenging year in which the company let go of more than 21,000 people, Meta this week claimed a significant increase in advertising income.
A number of tech firms have introduced chatbots with personalities, like the start-up Character.AI, financed by Andreessen Horowitz, whose language models imitate people like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Mario from the Mario franchise.