Meta plans to introduce personality-driven AI chatbots in an attempt to stem the loss of interest in new social network Threads, according to the FT.
These chatbots will have quirky characterful personalities, rather than being the relatively blank slates of all-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT.
The FT writes that these personalities will include Abraham Lincoln, and a surfer designed to dole out advice on travel plans.
They are reportedly dubbed “personas” and will launch as early as September 2023. It remains to be seen whether they will be more meaningful than the themed bots liberally scattered around Twitter’s user base.
These Meta bots are intended to help reduce the rate of people who choose to leave the platform, following Threads’s record-breaking meteoric rise.
Is Threads popular?
Threads became the fastest-growing online platform ever, racking up 100 million downloads in just five days after its launch on July 5.
Reuters reported on July 28 that more than half of sign-ups have since abandoned the platform. It is a predictable result when many of these users will have come from Twitter, arriving to find a less-developed platform most of their friends are yet to join.
On July 18, Mark Zuckerberg claimed Threads’s user base was strong despite the attrition.
“I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly, 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Threads post.
A more charitable take on this news is Meta now has a platform frequented by some of its most technologically engaged users, with whom it can test out new features, including chatbots posing as Lincoln.
Meta has been approached for comment on the report.
What will Meta do next?
The company, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, as well as Threads, has gone through several waves of redundancies in 2023, amounting to a reported loss of an estimated 21,000 staff members worldwide.
In late July, though, Meta announced a 12 per cent increase in advertising revenue as part of its Q2 2023 earnings report.
The company plans to release another VR headset later this year, the Meta Quest 3. To date, it has only been announced for release in “the fall”, at an event held just before Apple’s announcement of the Apple Vision Pro headset.
