March 20 - After a nearly year-long hiatus in launching theMeta The AI chatbot finally returns toEuropeMarkets. Starting this week, Meta AI will be rolled out progressively on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories, but is currently limited to text-based chat.
1AI understands that Meta AI first went live in the U.S. in 2023, when the company planned to bring it to Europe, but due to Irish privacysupervisoryThe company had to suspend its rollout plans in the region after the agency asked it to delay using content posted by Facebook and Instagram users for model training. In addition, Meta also suspended the launch of its multimodal Llama AI model in the EU due to regulatory concerns.
at present,Meta says its AI assistant only serves users as a chatbot in EuropeThe Meta AI can be used to help users brainstorm, plan a trip, or answer specific questions using information from the web. European users will also be able to use Meta AI to display specific types of content in their Instagram streams. However, they cannot use the tool to generate or edit images or ask questions about photos. The model was also not trained using data from EU users.
Ellie Heatrick, Meta spokesperson, said, "After nearly a year of close communication with multiple European regulators, we are now rolling out text-only mode in the region only, which has not been trained using first-party data from EU users. We will continue to work with regulators to make Meta's AI innovations, which have been rolled out in other parts of the world, available to European users."
Last November, Meta began introducing some AI features into Ray-Bans smart glasses in the EU, but the glasses currently don't support multimodal functionality, and users can't ask Meta AI questions about what they're seeing through the glasses.Meta doesn't seem to have given up on its plans to add more features to the European version of Meta AIThe company said it will work to "achieve functional parity with the U.S. market and gradually expand our service offerings over time."