Meta AI has been around in the United States since 2023 but the company had to delay its launch in the EU due to regulatory concerns. Now, it seems like Zuckerberg’s team has finally come to a (limited) agreement with European regulators and will be rolling out a version of Meta AI to the EU.
It looks like some of the kinks are yet to be ironed out, however, since Europe’s version of the product will be fairly limited compared to Meta AI in the United States. It will function as a chatbot only, without any of its Llama-powered multi-modal abilities such as generating images or answering questions about photos.
Instagram users will be able to use the chatbot to bring up certain kinds of posts on their Instagram feed, or simply chat with it to brainstorm ideas. One of the main reasons EU regulatory bodies blocked the launch of Meta AI last year was privacy concerns.
The company wanted to use all user content posted and all data collected since 2007 to train its AI — arguing that it was okay because everyone had chosen to display that information publicly on social media.
Unfortunately for Meta, this didn’t fly with the EU, leading to the nearly year-long round of talks to resolve the situation. The result is that the European version of Meta AI is not trained on any EU user data at all — and multi-modal abilities have been removed for now while further negotiations take place.
The company has confirmed that it wants to keep talks going and bring more features to its European offering eventually, so the only thing to do is wait for it to happen! For now, the limited version will be available starting this week on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
