Mark Zuckerberg announces new team at Meta working on A.I. products for Instagram, WhatsApp

 KEY POINTS

• Meta will create a new product group inside the company focused on generative AI, a new set of techniques that allow computers to generate text, draw pictures, and create other media that resemble human output.

Founder and CEO of US online social media and social networking service Facebook Mark Zuckerberg reacts upon his arrival for a meeting with European Commission vice-president in charge for Values and Transparency, in Brussels, on February 17, 2020.

Kenzo Tribouillard | AFP | Getty Images

Meta will create a new product group inside the company focused on generative AI, a new set of machine learning techniques that allow computers to generate text, draw pictures, and create other media that resemble human output.

The move comes as big tech companies and well-capitalized startups alike race to tout advances in machine learning techniques and incorporate artificial intelligence models into their products.

The unit will combine several teams across Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. The new group will be organized under current Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

Zuckerberg said that the team would build “creative and expressive” tools to be used inside Meta’s products.

“We’re exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences,” Zuckerberg said. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”

For example, large language models created by OpenAI have been integrated into a Microsoft Bing chatbot as well as a separate chatbot called ChatGPT. Google is also working on a chatbot named Bard.

On Monday, Snap announced that it would integrate a ChatGPT bot into its Snapchat app.

Last week, Meta announced its own new large language model called LLaMA. Meta said at the time that its models are distinguished because they are available to researchers and that they are smaller and less expensive to use than larger models.

But the announcement was also a sign that Meta, which does a significant amount of research into artificial intelligence, was not going to let competitors pass it by in the AI race.