Meta is launching its artificial intelligence chatbot in Europe almost a year after it suspended its launch in the region. Starting this week, Meta AI will be launched on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories – but for now, it will be limited to text chat functions.
Meta AI is scheduled to launch in the US in 2023. Although the company intended to bring the assistant to Europe, Meta had to suspend the launch in the region after the Irish privacy watchdog asked it to postpone training on content posted by Facebook and Instagram users. It also halted the launch of its multimodal artificial intelligence model Llama AI in the European Union due to regulatory concerns.
For now, Meta says that its AI assistant will work only as a chatbot for users in Europe, helping to generate ideas, plan trips, or answer specific questions using information from the Internet. European users will also be able to use Meta AI to search for specific content in their Instagram feed. However, they will not be able to use this tool to create or edit images, or ask questions about a photo. The model is also not trained to work with data from EU users.
“This launch comes after nearly a year of intensive collaboration with various European regulators, and we currently only offer a text-based model in the region that has not been trained to work with EU user data,” Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick tells The Verge. “We will continue to work with regulators to ensure that people in Europe have access to and can properly serve the AI innovations from Meta that are already available globally.”
Last November, Meta started to introduce some AI features into Ray-Bans smart glasses in the EU, but the glasses currently do not support multimodal features that allow users to ask Meta’s AI about what they are seeing. It seems that Meta is not abandoning its plans to add more features to the European version of Meta AI, as the company states that it will work to “achieve parity with the US and expand our offering over time.”
