Meta launches AI app; Zuckerberg chats with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at developer event
Working to differentiate itself in the crowded field of artificial intelligence, Meta Platforms has launched a standalone AI app — with a social media component — to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The Meta AI app is built with the company's Llama 4 AI system. It includes a 'discover' feed that lets users see how others are interacting with AI. It also has a voice mode for interacting with the AI.
'It's smart for Meta to differentiate its ChatGPT competitor by drawing from the company's social media roots. The app's Discover feed is like a version of the OG Facebook Feed but only focused on AI use cases," said Forrester research director Mike Proulx.
By letting users link their Facebook and Instagram accounts, the Meta AI app 'gets a leg up on instantly personalising its user experience with social media context.'
Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing it for free as an open-source product. The company says more than a billion people use its AI products each month.
At the Menlo Park, California-based tech giant's inaugural conference, LlamaCon, on Tuesday (April 29, 2025), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chatted with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a technical discussion around the speed of AI development and how the technology is shifting both their companies — where AI is already writing code — as well as the world.
Acknowledging there is a lot of "hype' around AI, Zuckerberg said 'if this is going to lead to massive increases in productivity, that needs to be reflected in major increases in GDP.'
'This is going take some multiple years, many years, to play out,' Zuckerberg said. 'I'm curious how you think, what's your current outlook on what we should be looking for to understand the progress that this is making?'
Nadella brought up the advent of electricity, saying that 'AI has the promise, but you now have to sort of really have it deliver the real change in productivity — and that requires software and also management change, right? Because in some sense, people have to work with it differently.'
He said it took 50 years before people figured out to change how factories operated with electricity.
Zuckerberg replied 'Well, we're all investing as if it's not going to take 50 years, so I hope it doesn't take 50 years.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
30 minutes ago
- Time of India
Welcome to campus, here's your ChatGPT
OpenAI , the maker of ChatGPT , has a plan to overhaul college education -- by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud before a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch "AI-native universities." Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 0:00 Loaded : 0% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track default , selected Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like How Much Money Should You Have Before Hiring a Financial Advisor? SmartAsset Learn More Undo "Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education," Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon "every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized AI account." To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. Live Events Some universities, including the University of Maryland and California State University, are already working to make AI tools part of students' everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories OpenAI's campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. The company is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted dueling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service "through finals 2026." OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In late 2022, the company's rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fueled cheating. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. Less than three years later, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as research, writing, computer programming and idea-generating aides. Now OpenAI is capitalizing on ChatGPT's popularity to promote the company's AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. OpenAI's service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections, than the company's free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for university use. (OpenAI offers consumers premium versions of its chatbot for a monthly fee.) OpenAI's push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established. A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labor exploitation and environmental costs. OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates -- particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide AI tools and training. California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for "California's future AI-driven economy." Cal State said the effort would help make the school "the nation's first and largest AI-empowered university system." Some universities say they are embracing the new AI tools in part because they want their schools to help guide, and develop guardrails for, the technologies. " You're worried about the ecological concerns. You're worried about misinformation and bias," Edmund Clark, the chief information officer of California State University, said at a recent education conference in San Diego. "Well, join in. Help us shape the future." Last spring, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Edu, its first product for universities, which offers access to the company's latest AI. Paying clients like universities also get more privacy: OpenAI says it does not use the information that students, faculty and administrators enter into ChatGPT Edu to train its AI. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.) Last fall, OpenAI hired Belsky to oversee its education efforts. An ed tech startup veteran, she previously worked at Coursera, which offers college and professional training courses. She is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI's premium services to universities for a fee while advertising free ChatGPT directly to students. OpenAI also convened a panel of college students recently to help get their peers to start using the tech. Among those students are power users like Delphine Tai-Beauchamp, a computer science major at the University of California, Irvine. She has used the chatbot to explain complicated course concepts, as well as help explain coding errors and make charts diagraming the connections between ideas. "I wouldn't recommend students use AI to avoid the hard parts of learning," Tai-Beauchamp said. She did recommend students try AI as a study aid. "Ask it to explain something five different ways." Belsky said these kinds of suggestions helped the company create its first billboard campaign aimed at college students. "Can you quiz me on the muscles of the leg?" asked one ChatGPT billboard, posted this spring in Chicago. "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus," another said. Belsky said OpenAI had also begun funding research into the educational effects of its chatbots. "The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for AI in the university that are most impactful?" Belsky said during a December AI event at Cornell Tech in New York City. "And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?" Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT. Jared DeForest, the chair of environmental and plant biology at Ohio University, created his own tutoring bot, called SoilSage, which can answer students' questions based on his published research papers and science knowledge. Limiting the chatbot to trusted information sources has improved its accuracy, he said. "The curated chatbot allows me to control the information in there to get the product that I want at the college level," DeForest said. But even when trained on specific course materials, AI can make mistakes. In a new study -- "Can AI Hold Office Hours?" -- law school professors uploaded a patent law casebook into AI models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Then they asked dozens of patent law questions based on the casebook and found that all three AI chatbots made "significant" legal errors that could be "harmful for learning." "This is a good way to lead students astray," said Jonathan S. Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a co-author of the study. "So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down." OpenAI said the 250,000-word casebook used for the study was more than twice the length of text that its GPT-4o model can process at once. Anthropic said the study had limited usefulness because it did not compare the AI with human performance. Google said its model accuracy had improved since the study was conducted. Belsky said a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the AI "more valuable as you grow and learn." Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their AI chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life. "It would be their gateway to learning -- and career life thereafter," Belsky said.
Mint
2 hours ago
- Mint
Alexa! Can this Amazon executive make you cool again?
'And it actually played," he says, hands on his knees, leaning into the audience of reporters and analysts at February demonstration of Alexa+, a rebooted, AI-infused version of the virtual assistant. 'Sounds kind of funny right now, but 10 years ago, it was mind-blowing." During that first encounter with Alexa, Panay was working for Microsoft, developing Surface tablets and laptops that earned a cultlike following. Now, he is a year and a half into overseeing Amazon's devices and services—including Alexa, which hasn't changed much in the past decade, even as the tech world has been upended by advances like ChatGPT. After releasing Alexa to widespread acclaim in 2015, Amazon had a head start getting people to engage with AI. But users still primarily ask the voice assistant for things like timers and the weather. Alexa and the devices unit have become a multibillion-dollar drag on Amazon's bottom line, a reminder of how a company known for its limitless expansionary ambitions failed to win at the next big thing. For years, the devices unit unveiled a flurry of products like a house drone, a fitness wristband and a smartphone to see what might land with consumers. Alexa was integrated into microwaves, refrigerators and even eyeglasses. Panay has scaled back the number of launches, focusing instead on ensuring that products like Alexa+ are functioning perfectly before rolling out to roughly 600 million devices. 'I believe simple is always better," Panay, 52, said in an interview. 'Anything you buy from Amazon, you will not only fall in love with, but it's also going to be that much easier to use." Amazon has repeatedly delayed the full release of its smarter Alexa since first showcasing a version in September 2023. In early tests, as generative-AI capabilities were added, it became less reliable for existing tasks like turning on the lights. Responses were too often jumbled or took too long. The company says Alexa+ will be available as an optional software update this summer to most, if not all, customers, though it hasn't announced a specific date. According to the company, the new version of Alexa—which Panay refers to as 'she," a rarity even among employees—will be able to arrange personal calendar events, play the music you want based on a vague description and remember dietary preferences for at-home meals. Alexa will be conversational, able to talk about major sporting events like a human friend, and capable of contacting and scheduling a contractor for house repairs, Amazon says. Panay joined Amazon in October 2023 and inherited some of the delays, but he has also held up its wider release until he is satisfied that Alexa+ will work flawlessly, conversationally and with limited lag time, people familiar with the matter say. He is often testing it out at home and reporting bugs. In one meeting last year, he told staff that he and one of his daughters had prompted Alexa+ to play a top-50 song with only context clues, but Alexa couldn't find the song. He told his team that Alexa+ had to be better at helping people find what they were looking for. Panay built his reputation at Microsoft, where he was known as the 'godfather" of the Surface devices and oversaw Windows. He was instrumental in the popular, minimalist aesthetics of the Surface tablet and was known to ask company engineers about numerous small details. Surface products weren't an immediate success. In 2013, Microsoft took a $900 million charge related to its struggling Surface RT tablet before the Surface Pro 3 became a hit. Panay became the effusive onstage showman, cultivating product launches akin to Apple's. On stage, and most days, he wears all black to simplify his wardrobe decisions and adorns his outfits with gold bracelets or rings, and sometimes flashy Nike sneakers. Panos Panay, shown here in 2017, was well-known for his Surface product launch events at Microsoft. At Microsoft, Panay hosted his friend and comedian Trevor Noah, who's known for his interest in technology, more than once. In 2019, Noah posted on Instagram a photo of himself with Panay in a Microsoft lab, saying he'd asked the executive for 'extra features and free Xbox games." Panay spent weeks preparing for his presentations at Microsoft, said Ryan Day, who worked on the Surface's public-relations team. Panay would ask every team member how they thought a product's story should be told, and he pulled engineers to the side to ask how the hinges on devices would work or to figure out exact dimensions that would entice customers. 'He was obsessed with the mechanics of physical products," Day said. 'He never got up there and winged it." Panay left Microsoft after more than 19 years to join Amazon, where he took over a sprawling division that includes everything from the Kindle e-reader to the Zoox autonomous vehicle and the Project Kuiper satellite-internet business, meant to compete with Elon Musk's Starlink. He knows that getting Alexa+ right is critical because it will release to millions of people who depend on the technology across multiple devices. It's a very public rollout. Some new features, such as certain personalized reminders and routines for family members, grocery ordering, creating personalized music, and third-party services like food ordering through Grubhub, haven't been available for early testers. An Amazon spokesman said that nearly 90% of the Alexa+ features that the company announced are available for early users, though it isn't clear how big that group is. The spokesman said that the rest of the features will be available this summer. Teams have demonstrated Alexa+ to Panay every few weeks. At one internal demo late last year, the assistant accidentally duplicated items in a shopping cart for a recipe. It also would default to recommending bananas to everyone since those are one of the most popular grocery items on Amazon. Panay insists that all of Alexa's problems must be ironed out before the release. 'He really has us putting our back into 'Let's be a world-class consumer electronics company,'" said Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Echo, who reports to Panay. Last year, Panay noticed that the Echo Show visual display with Alexa+ had some screens with an easy-to-spot 'back" button but other screens where he had to swipe to go back. He told staff to make the function consistent, saying other, non-Amazon devices had such consistency. Panay—not to be confused with his cousin, Panos A. Panay, the president of the Recording Academy, which organizes the Grammy Awards—was born in the Los Angeles area and is of Cypriot-Greek descent. He grew up in Burbank, Calif., and received a bachelor's degree from California State University, Northridge, and a master's in business from Pepperdine University. Early in his career, he worked at NMB Technologies, where he helped develop products such as keyboards and speakers. He now lives in the Seattle area. Each day, the married father of four wakes up at 4:15 a.m. to journal, typically writing personal memos about the products he and his team are working on. Lately, he says he's learning from 'Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor known for his ideas on Stoicism. 'You can't always be beating yourself up," he said. Philosophical works are 'where I can always be learning and not judging, just trying to be myself at the end of the day." Amazon's original financial strategy was to sell underpriced Echo speakers enabled with Alexa in hopes of getting people to spend more throughout the Amazon ecosystem. It didn't work, and the Amazon devices unit, dragged down by the financial performance of Echo, has overall been a money loser. It became clear that it wasn't going to be profitable alone, which is why the company is now tying Alexa+ to Prime, said a person familiar with the matter. Alexa+ will be included with an Amazon Prime membership, which costs $14.99 a month, or as a separate $19.99-a-month subscription.
Time of India
11 hours ago
- Time of India
Sundar Pichai answers who would be next Google CEO
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai expects artificial intelligence to play a critical role in the tech giant's future leadership during the Bloomberg Tech Conference earlier this week. On the question of whether a human or AI will run Google in future, Pichai stated, 'I do think whoever is running it will have an extraordinary AI companion .' 'The products we built tremendously impact society. The journey of technologies, doing the hard work to make sure you're harnessing it in a way that benefits people. I think that'll be an important quality to have,' the Google CEO said. Before Pichai took the stage, Meta Platforms Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Andrew Bosworth said there has been a cultural shift in Silicon Valley , where it is now more palatable for the tech industry to develop resources for the US military. The company announced a partnership with defence contractor Anduril Industries Inc. last week to develop products for the US military, including an artificial intelligence-powered helmet with virtual and augmented reality features. Pichai said Google's parent Alphabet will keep hiring engineers at least into 2026, emphasising that human talent remains key even as the company ramps up AI investments. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories 'I expect we will grow from our current engineering base even into next year, because it allows us to do more with the opportunity space,' Pichai said. 'I just view this as making engineers dramatically more productive, getting a lot of the mundane aspects out of what they do.' Tech majors, like Microsoft, have fired more staff this year, reflecting in part the enormous investments needed to ensure leadership in AI. The firings have stoked fears about the technology replacing certain job functions. Google itself has conducted rounds of layoffs in recent years to free up resources. Pichai pointed out that while AI excels in areas like coding, the models continue to make basic mistakes, requiring human intervention.
