Users may not care much about the new AI chatbot from Meta, but it's going ahead and launching it, with Indian users now set to experience the magic that is Meta's most advanced AI chatbot tool.
Yes, after testing it on Indian users for the past couple of months, Meta is now rolling out its new AI search element to Indian users, starting it off with English language queries.

Meta started testing its AI chatbot with Indian users in April, but put a hold on a wider rollout of the feature because of the country's general elections.

Meta now is rolling out access to the tool, bringing its Llama 3-powered chatbot to Facebook's largest user nation, where 378 million people access the platform each month.

But do people want it?

There has thus been mixed use of the AI-based chat app from Meta, with many complaining in trying to perform a simple search using the application.

In this regard, the issue could be that some of the older cohorts on Facebook may be bewildered as to what this new feature for AI-based search functionality actually is, and how it works, leading to rather unsatisfactory outcomes with these efforts.

For its part, Meta recognizes not everyone's totally buying into its new AI-based search and creation tools. But even the short-term numbers aren't especially convincing, at least according to most available metrics the company is decidedly long-term optimistic.

No. Because, for instance, all the while that the increasing capacity of AI is making possible an entirely new range of things, such possibilities are probably not best located at Facebook. Like, okay, do you need such prompts in addition to your daily doses of Facebook posts, trying to guide you through a related search?
In general, this reflects a bigger problem in AI for social apps: really, there is no clear space for generative AI tools in platforms built to encourage people-to-people interaction.

For sure, social media apps have come a long way from this use case and are now at least as much about entertainment as social connectivity. But the injection of generative AI, simulating human responses and activities, still seems entirely intrusive. And there is perhaps some novelty value, but surely not much more than that.

So all these platforms keep telling us it's the future, it's the next big thing, this is how we all are going to interact, so we better get used to it.

Is it an improvement? I have no idea, but that also seems a bit irrelevant in most of the broader AI debates.