Meta rolls out Llama 3-powered AI assistant in India

Facebook-parent Meta has announced the launch of its artificial intelligence (AI) in India. Meta AI, first unveiled in 2023 at the annual Connect event, is now rolled out in English in India. Meta AI can be leveraged across WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram for tasks such as question-answers, writing text, generating images from text, etc.

To be sure, as per the latest update in April, Meta introduced the upgraded version of Meta AI, built with its large language model Llama 3. At the time of this announcement, the feature was made available in countries such as Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Notably, Llama 3, the base model for Meta AI, was launched in April this year and touted as Meta’s most capable LLM. An open-source model, Llama 3 offers lesser false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. The company said that the latest has improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction.

Meta AI launch in India follows a similar step taken by Google last week. On June 18, Google formally launched the Gemini App in India. With this launch, the Gemini app and Gemini Advanced (Gemini 1.5 Pro model), is made available in nine Indian languages. It includes languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

In a blog announcing the availability of the Gemini App, Google said that the launch in the country’s ‘strong mobile-first culture’ marks a step forward in building ‘a truly conversational, multimodal, and helpful AI assistant’. Gemini will also be available in Google Messages to help users draft messages, plan events, or brainstorm ideas without leaving the Messages app. Currently, only available in English, the feature will be subsequently rolled out to other languages on select devices.