The big AI race: Meta set to create own search engine

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Joshua Fagbemi

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Meta has announced that it is currently working on an artificial intelligence-based search engine for optimization. The company made this decision as part of its synergy to reduce dependence on Google and Microsoft’s search engines.

According to reports, the web crawler will be installed on the company’s chatbot, Meta AI. The Chatbot, available on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, will provide users with engaging conversations on current events and answers to their prompts.

Innovation is a crucial point in the ongoing AI search engine race. The AI search engine segment is heating up with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all vying for dominance in the rapidly evolving market.

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Meta currently relies on Google and Bing search engines to respond to queries on news, events, stocks, and sports to users. The company added that its AI chatbot will rely on content from the news platform, Reuters to answer users’ questions ranging from news to current events.

The Trio Race​


For a while, Google has dominated two core elements of the way we use the internet: search engines and browsers. However, the rise of new AI tools means that dominance is being threatened more than it has ever been in years.

Meanwhile, Google is aggressively integrating its latest and most powerful AI model, Gemini, into core products like Search, to deliver conversational and intuitive search experiences.

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Similarly, OpenAI relies on its largest investor, Microsoft, for web access to answer topical queries, using its Bing search engine.

Scraping web data to train AI models and search engines, however, has raised concerns about copyright infringement and fair compensation for content creators.

Also Read: Sextortion: Meta announces measures to protect users on Instagram

The Race: how Meta is catching up​


Beyond the generative AI technology that Meta already offers in its battle against the other big tech powers, Zuckerberg is aiming for “general intelligence.” This is focused on creating AI that can perform tasks better than humans.

In February, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, laid out Meta’s game plan for “playing to win” against the trio in the high-stakes AI arms race. He expressed that Meta’s secret weapon is its walled garden of data.

Zuckerberg initially unveiled his vision for artificial general intelligence via an Instagram Reels video. He expanded on the plan, describing it as not just a far-off science project, but an effort to incorporate AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) into Meta products like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

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Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO

It’s clear that we’re going to need our models to be able to reason, plan code, remember, and many other cognitive abilities to provide the best versions of the services that we envision,” he said. “We’re playing to win here, and I expect us to continue investing aggressively in this area.”

He pointed out that Meta’s AI model will centre on content that appeals to the public good. He also added that it will differ from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which are training their AI models on the public web data crawled by their search engines every day.

There are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos, which we estimate is greater than the common crawl data set,” Zuckerberg said on Meta’s earnings.

We’ll be building the most popular and advanced AI products and services. If we succeed, everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done,” Zuckerberg said,

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According to a popular forecast, Meta’s capital expenditures could increase by as much as $9 billion this year, totalling between $30 billion to $37 billion, compared to $28.1 billion in 2023.

The company expressed that this could be the new normal. It again noted that “we expect our ambitious long-term AI research and product development efforts will require growing infrastructure investments beyond this year.

To realize his vision of Meta as the AI leader, Zuckerberg has yet to expand on how exactly Meta user activity will be used as training data for Meta’s AI, and how the company will navigate the potential issues around user privacy.

The post The big AI race: Meta set to create own search engine first appeared on Technext.
 
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