Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that the company's AI chatbot, Meta AI, has launched in six countries, including Brazil, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay. The company stated that, in addition to these countries, Meta AI will also be released in more countries in the coming weeks, including the Middle East and Southeast Asia, such as Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Yemen. Meta AI will also add support for Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese languages. After this release, Meta AI will cover approximately 40 countries and support more than ten languages. However, the company did not provide specific launch dates for these countries.
According to Meta, the company's AI assistant can be used on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger applications, as well as on the Meta.ai website. At the same time, Meta AI will be launched on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the United Kingdom and Australia. However, the UK launch currently only supports voice functionality, and Meta has not provided a timetable for when UK customers can obtain full multimodal functionality on the glasses.
It is worth noting that the European Union is absent from this expansion. This summer, Meta stated that due to regulatory concerns about the EU, the company would not introduce multimodal AI services in the EU. Previously, Zuckerberg had publicly criticized European regulatory agencies for their approach to dealing with the proliferation of artificial intelligence.
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At last month's Meta Connect event, Zuckerberg mentioned that Meta AI currently has "close to" 500 million users worldwide. He also stated that by the end of this year, the chatbot is expected to become the most widely used AI assistant in the world.
Meta's Chief Financial Officer, Susan Li, stated during the earnings call for the second quarter of 2024 that India is the largest market for Meta AI, mainly due to the number of WhatsApp users in the country exceeding 500 million.
Last month, the company added new features to Meta AI, such as new celebrity voices and support for lip-synced translation. In addition, the company expanded its "Imagine" feature, driven by generative AI, to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, allowing users to generate photos through natural language prompts. Moreover, Meta AI can now understand users' photos, providing answers about them and even editing them.
Furthermore, Meta also launched the so-called most advanced media foundation model, Movie Gen, this month. Previous articles from Wall Street See and Hear stated that Meta said Movie Gen is the company's "breakthrough generative AI research for media," encompassing modalities such as images, videos, and audio. Users can create custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and convert personal images into unique videos by simply inputting text. Movie Gen's performance in executing these tasks is superior to similar models in the industry in human evaluations.
Meta introduced Movie Gen as the "most advanced, immersive storytelling model suite," combining the company's first wave of generative AI media research, the Make-A-Scene series models, which can create images, audio, video, and 3D animations, as well as the second wave of research models targeting the Llama Image base model that emerged with the diffusion model, which can achieve higher-quality image and video generation and image editing.