The Meta AI chatbot is finally rolling out to European countries from this week, and will be accessible in Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger. However, the headline feature of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will not be available.
The generative AI feature first launched in the US back in 2023, but privacy concerns were raised when it came to light that the company had been training it on Facebook and Instagram posts since way back in 2007 ….
European privacy legislation required the company to allow EU and UK citizens to opt out of this, but privacy regulators were still not happy, arguing that it should instead be opt-in. That saw the company forced to pause the rollout in Europe, while the expansion program continued in other parts of the world.
The rollout is now being resumed, following what Meta describes as “intensive engagement” with regulators. However, The Verge reports that only text chat will be available for now.
Starting this week, Meta AI will roll out across WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories […]
For now, Meta says its AI assistant will only function as a chatbot for users in Europe, helping to brainstorm ideas, plan a trip, or answer specific questions using information from the web. European users will also be able to use Meta AI to surface certain kinds of content on their Instagram feed. However, they can’t use the tool to do things like generate or edit images, as well as ask questions about a photo. The model isn’t trained on EU user data, either.
This massively impacts Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which are unable to offer their headline feature of being able to ask the AI to see what you’re looking at and answer questions about it.
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