The US group Meta is working on a search engine based on artificial intelligence (AI). The company, which owns the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, wants to reduce its dependence on search engines such as Alphabet’s Google or Microsoft’s Bing. The US tech website The Information reported this on Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
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According to the report The search engine, powered by a new web crawler, is to be integrated with the Meta AI chatbot from Meta on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Meta’s new AI search engine will therefore provide conversational answers to current events, news, stock prices or sports results. Meta currently relies on the search engines Google and Bing.
The anonymous source told The Information that Meta wants to reduce its dependence on the two competitors. Additionally, the move could provide Meta with a Plan B if either Google or Microsoft or both decide to end the partnership with Meta, the report said.
In mid-April, Meta replaced the Large Language Model (LLM) in its chatbot Meta AI with a new, improved version. Meta Llama 2 was replaced by Meta Llama 3. The launch was widely interpreted as a challenge to the dominance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Now Meta is probably also attacking the search engine field. This market is a highly competitive one. Google, for example, has integrated its powerful AI model Gemini into search to improve interactivity in search queries. OpenAI, in turn, uses Microsoft’s Bing for web access to answer search queries.
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