Check out Meta’s not-so-cunning plan to take on ChatGPT

Meta wants a piece of the pie — a big piece — when it comes to generative AI. As part of its long-term strategy to embed itself in every part of our lives, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is planning to launch its Meta AI chatbot as a standalone app, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources claiming to have knowledge of the matter.

Meta is aiming to launch the AI chatbot app between April and June this year, the sources said. The company may also offer a subscription model with more advanced features.

A standalone Meta AI app would compete with the slew of other AI chatbots already out there, including popular ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, X’s Grok, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, a Chinese effort that burst onto the scene just last month.

Meta unveiled Meta AI in September 2023 before incorporating it into its stable of apps — among them Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — starting last April. Like other generative AI apps, Meta AI can converse in a natural, human-like way, and also create images in response to prompts input by users.

Speaking in January, Zuckerberg said that 2025 would be “the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than one billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.”

By offering Meta AI as a standalone app rather than only as a part of its social media apps, Meta believes it will lead to deeper, more rewarding interaction with the AI, sources told CNBC.

Certainly, if a big hitter like Meta does release Meta AI as a standalone app, it will increase competition and potentially further fragment the AI chatbot sector.

Additionally, Meta’s huge data resources could give its AI an edge in personalization, but at the same time its arrival may raise more privacy concerns compared to other AI chatbots.

Responding to news that Meta may be about to release a standalone app for its AI chatbot, OpenAI chief Sam Altman quipped in a post on X: “OK, fine, maybe we’ll do a social app,” adding, “lol if Facebook tries to come at us and we just uno reverse them it would be so funny.”

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

DeepSeek can create criminal plans and explain mustard gas, researchers say

There’s been a frenzy in the world of AI surrounding the sudden rise of DeepSeek — an open-source reasoning model out of China that’s taken the AI fight to OpenAI. It’s already been the center of controversy surrounding its censorship, it’s caught the attention of both Microsoft and the U.S. government, and it caused Nvidia to suffer the largest single-day stock loss in history.

Still, security researchers say the problem goes deeper. Enkrypt AI is an AI security company that sells AI oversight to enterprises leveraging large language models (LLMs), and in a new research paper, the company found that DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model was 11 times more likely to generate “harmful output” compared to OpenAI’s O1 model. That harmful output goes beyond just a few naughty words, too.

Chatbots are going to Washington with ChatGPT Gov

In an X post Monday commenting on DeepSeek’s sudden success, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised to “pull up some releases” and it appears he has done so. OpenAI unveiled its newest product on Tuesday, a “tailored version of ChatGPT designed to provide U.S. government agencies with an additional way to access OpenAI’s frontier models,” per the announcement post. ChatGPT Gov will reportedly offer even tighter data security measures than ChatGPT Enterprise, but how will it handle the hallucinations that plague the company’s other models?

According to OpenAI, more than 90,000 federal, state, and local government employees across 3,500 agencies have queried ChatGPT more than 18 million times since the start of 2024. The new platform will enable government agencies to enter “non-public, sensitive information” into ChatGPT while it runs within their secure hosting environments — specifically, the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government community cloud — and cybersecurity frameworks like IL5 or CJIS. This enables each agency to “manage their own security, privacy and compliance requirements,” Felipe Millon, Government Sales lead at OpenAI told reporters on the press call Tuesday.

Sam Altman confirms ChatGPT’s latest model is free for all users

Earlier this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared the company’s newest reasoning model, o3, ready for public consumption after it passed its external safety testing and announced that it would soon be arriving as both an API and ChatGPT model option in the coming weeks. On Thursday, Altman took to social media to confirm that the lightweight version, o3-mini, won’t just be made available to paid subscribers at the Plus, Teams, and Pro tiers, but to free tier users as well.

https://x.com/sama/status/1882478782059327666