While the competition to bring state-of-the-art technological advancement in AI between tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, Meta is reportedly building its own AI search engine. A report on The Information published on Monday, 28 October says that Meta is working on a search engine that provides conversational answers about current events to people who use Meta AI chatbot.
The company is aiming to reduce its dependence on popular search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing which are now providing information for the conversations. The development of the Meta AI search engine is also looked at as a backup for Meta if Google or Microsoft withdrew from providing information.
There are over 400 million monthly users of the Meta AI chatbot which is based on Meta’s social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp according to the Thread posted on August by the Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The popularity and usage of the company’s chatbot are gaining new users every week and it is pretty common for a company like Meta to bring up new ideas that can improve its user efficiency.
Meta AI offers a tool for image generation along with text information and summaries. The information provided by the Meta chatbot relies on third-party search engines like Google and Bing for sources of information. A web link to Bing is also provided by the Meta chatbot when the information provided is a result of its web search on Bing. The creation of an independent search engine for the company points out the fact of making the Meta chatbot self-reliable.
Meta earlier this week on October 25 announced that they will be teaming up with Reuters to provide answers for new-related queries for the Chatbot. This will be a multiyear partnership to make available all the latest news up-to-date. This can be seen as Meta’s idea of integrating news into its chatbot, rather than through social media scrolling which can be suitable for active news readers.
It will also be a comeback of Meta to the news field after the discontinuation of the News Tab. The coming year, without doubt, will witness a very efficient AI chatbot by Meta that will be able to provide up-to-date content.
Chatbots usually rely on their internal databases as the primary source of information. These databases provide answers for frequently asked questions and ready-made responses. They can rely on web searches for recent and real-time news. Chatbots are further connected to external apps and sources with API integration.
The report says that Meta’s team has been working for eight months to build a database that could become the search engine for Meta Chatbot. Meta has also hinted previously this year about its web-crawling technology and said that they are training AI models and improving products.
It seems like Meta is now aware of its limitations and is reducing reliance on other companies, especially after getting a hit with Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature. ATT after its launch in 2021 gave over a $10 billion hit on Meta’s ad revenue. Meta has also hinted at working on building location data that could be an alternative to Google Maps.
Meta is not the only one that is aiming forward on AI technology. Leading AI providers like OpenAI have also announced a similar search engine called SearchGPT which might be integrated into the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Apple had also hinted at replacing some functions of Google Search with Apple’s AI tools.
All major tech companies are aiming to become self-reliant and broaden to every field with the latest hardware and software developments. Meta is also building its own Metaverse with their hands on all technology-related trends.
