Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was warned that Instagram and Facebook could go extinct, here is why

Meta's chief AI scientist had warned CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook and Instagram could "go extinct" if they don't act fast to catch up with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In Short

• Meta's chief AI scientist warned CEO Mark Zuckerberg of the potential 'extinction' of Facebook and Instagram.
• He said that this will happen if they don't keep pace with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
• Meta introduced its AI assistant, Meta AI, in September.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and took the world by surprise. What was previously thought to be exclusive to humans was now being done by AI and we all knew that in the future, this emerging tech would only grow more powerful.

Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, reports had surfaced that tech giant Google was losing sleep over it and was rushing to work on its own AI products. And now, reports say that the situation was similar at Meta too, as the company's top AI scientist had warned CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the "possible extinction" of Facebook and Instagram if they didn't catch up with ChatGPT.

Meta AI scientist on ChatGPT launch

It has been over a year since we saw ChatGPT enter the market and Meta is yet to enter the AI race properly. The company did announce its own AI chatbots that will be a part of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. However, these chatbots are available to only a few users as of now.

According to a report by The New York Times, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, told Marck Zuckerberg that they needed to "catch up" with OpenAI's new chatbot and release their own AI assistant soon. The two were waiting in line for lunch at Meta's headquarters, as per the report.

LeCun added that if Meta didn't start working on its own AI assistant soon, Facebook and Instagram could go "extinct".

The report further said that even though Zuckerberg didn't immediately respond to LeCun's statement, the latter's words "irked" the CEO. Yet, later that evening, Zuckerberg told LeCun that he has been thinking about what he said and that he (LeCun) is right.

About Meta AI

Meta introduced its AI assistant in September this year and called it Meta AI. The company also announced that the AI assistant can generate images as well, thanks to Meta’s partnership with Microsoft Bing.

"Meta AI is a new assistant you can interact with like a person, available on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and coming soon to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. It’s powered by a custom model that leverages technology from Llama 2 and our latest large language model (LLM) research. In text-based chats, Meta AI has access to real-time information through our search partnership with Bing and offers a tool for image generation," the company wrote on its blog.

In addition to MetaAI, the tech giant also introduced 28 other AI chatbots with different personalities.

Meta, in the blog post, said that each of these chatbots has a distinct personality as well as a ‘backstory’. That’s not all, these chatbots will also have profiles on social media.

"We partnered with cultural icons and influencers to play and embody some of these AIs. They’ll each have profiles on Instagram and Facebook, so you can explore what they’re all about," the company said.

Published By:
Divyanshi Sharma
Published On:
Dec 6, 2023