Meta introduces AI chatbot for internal use: Report

Meta has launched a new artificial intelligence chatbot for its employees’ internal use. Called Metamate, this chatbot is trained on the company’s internal data and is currently being rolled out to a small group, a report by The Verge said. 

Metamate will help employees write code, summarise meetings, and debug features. Users will be able to create prompts and share them with colleagues. Reportedly, Meta was initially in talks with Microsoft and OpenAI for building a tool like Metamate but ultimately decided to develop it in-house. 

Meta already has a generative AI-based coding assistant called CodeCompose to increase developer productivity throughout the software development lifecycle, similar to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot.

Last week, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in an internal meeting announced that generative AI will be integrated into the company’s offerings and internal workflow. 

Announcements included a text prompt-based editing feature for Instagram stories, AI avatars for Messenger and WhatsApp, and a generative AI-focused internal hackathon slated for July. Zuckerberg also said that the company would publish more AI research work and share it with the open-source community.

In February, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post that the company is building a ‘top-level’ product group focused on generative AI. “We're starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products,” he then said.

On the hardware side, in the past month, Meta announced an in-house custom accelerator chip called Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) for training and running artificial intelligence models. It is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that combines different circuits on one board to carry out multiple tasks parallelly.