Meta is currently in an extravagant spending mode for AI, inking massive deals to scale up infrastructure and poaching talent with pay packages that dwarf even those of top-tier professional athletes. But the company’s efforts haven’t paid off in terms of consumer success, and most of the products have been limited to flexing muscles with AI slop or editing tools.
What’s brewing at Meta’s AI kitchen?
It seems Meta is ready to step up with some practically convenient AI tools, as it races to catch up with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. The company is reportedly working on an AI tool that will take a look at your Facebook feed and give you a personalized briefing about it each morning.
“The effort, dubbed Project Luna internally, would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users,” reports The Washington Post, citing internal documents. If that sounds familiar, well, it’s because OpenAI already offers a feature like that called ChatGPT Pulse.
It sounds familiar
Meta, or even OpenAI, won’t be the first players to attempt an AI-powered briefing. Interestingly, the idea was implemented widely by Samsung on its smartphones as Now Brief. This feature, in turn, draws some inspiration from the At a Glance system that Google has offered for a while on its Pixel smartphones.
The whole idea behind Now Brief, which is widely available across the current crop of Galaxy smartphones running One UI 7 or later, is to collect insights from across apps that deal with news, health, tasks, routines, travel, and wallet. All this information is then shown to users as a neatly designed dashboard.
Our expert take
In Meta’s case, the AI-powered daily brief experience will be centered around Facebook. The company initially plans to test it among a small pool of users in New York and San Francisco. It’s unclear whether Meta will eventually expand it to other social products, such as Instagram, Threads, or even WhatsApp.
So far, Meta’s integration of AI smarts into its social apps has been pretty lukewarm and divisive. Meta AI is already available in these apps and the smart glasses, as well, but its utility is pretty limited compared to ChatGPT and Gemini. Additionally, the shoehorning of AI-generated videos in social apps and as a standalone app called Vibes has drawn sharp criticism.
On the other hand, pushing an AI tool that can analyze Facebook activity and present it as a summarized brief sounds like a good idea. Instead of overwhelming users with a barrage of notifications, a well-formatted brief would be a welcome change. Social media is the biggest strength of Meta, and if it can land meaningful AI experiences that can spur adoption, it can unlock the sorely missing “AI revenue” stream for the company, as well.
