According to reports, Meta is trying to lessen its reliance on Google and Microsoft after being negatively impacted by an Apple privacy feature three years prior. Meta is creating a search engine for its chatbot, according to a report published by The Information on Monday. Additionally, the business has teamed up with Reuters to assist its AI in responding to queries about news.
According to reports, Meta has been working on web crawling for at least eight months. According to reports, the company wants to incorporate the indexes into Meta AI so that the chatbot has an alternative to Microsoft Bing and Google Search. This summer, Meta revealed its web crawler technology to the public, claiming it was only for “training AI models or improving products” and not explicitly revealing that it was developing a search backend. According to reports, Xueyuan Su, a senior engineering manager, is in charge of the search engine project.
According to The Information, reliance on other large tech firms that have previously “stung” the business, such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), is the direct cause of the change. In the past, Meta predicted that the 2021 iPhone privacy feature will result in over $10 billion in lost ad revenue. (It was sued for allegedly breaking its regulations since it was so worried about the feature.)
It is believed that CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be as independent as possible in order to prevent a recurrence of that scenario in the event that Microsoft or Google were to deny it access to web searches. Whether Meta now compensates either business for that access is unknown.
Meta was contacted by Engadget for comment. If we receive a response, we’ll update this story.
The business’s investments in AI seem to be yielding positive results. In August, Zuckerberg wrote on Threads that Meta AI boasts more than 400 million monthly active users and over 185 million weekly users. The Facebook founder added, “We’re expanding rapidly, and we haven’t even launched in the UK, Brazil, or EU yet.” Early this month, OpenAI said that 250 million people used ChatGPT each week.
