Meta’s Working on a Dedicated AI Chatbot for Group Chats

Aa part of its ongoing effort to make AI a part of your life, whether you like it or not, Meta is reportedly developing a new AI chatbot for your group chats, which will be able to get you caught up on things that you missed while you were offline, find mentions within the chat stream, remind you of meet up locations, and more, all via a private back-and-forth sidebar chat with the bot.

As you can see in this example, shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, Meta’s developing a new AI bot called “Kai,” which would be available in group chats specifically, and will be able to analyze the content of your group discussions.

Which some people will probably feel a bit uneasy with, but I assume the idea of developing Kai is that this will make people feel more secure in separating their chats from the broader Meta AI chatbot that’s available in all Meta apps. Kai, presumably, will keep your private chat data separate from your main profile, and by having a separate DM chatbot, that will provide the benefits of AI analysis, without exposing your chat data.

As you can see in this second image, Kai will also be able to generate images on the fly, and help you compose responses, so if you want to misrepresent your personality to the group, you can use AI to make yourself sound smarter and cooler than you actually are. Or something.

So why is it called “Kai”?

Well, I assume it’s some play on the AI theme, though it could also be a reference to Zuckerberg’s surfing buddy Kai Lenny, who’s been teaching the Meta chief how to ride the waves.

As noted, the chatbot is part of Meta’s broader push to make AI a key element of its apps, which you also would have noted via its constant prompts to ask Meta AI, its image generation pop-ups in-stream, and its in-development AI video app.

Meta’s investing hundreds of billions of dollars into its AI infrastructure, and while the real goal of that spend is to develop AGI, and the next generation of AI tools, it also needs to maximize return on its money any way that it can, which is why it’s constantly trying to convince you that AI is super cool, and super helpful, in a range of ways.

And AI tools are helpful, though I’m not sure that they’re particularly beneficial on Facebook, or in Messenger, which are more aligned with personal connection and interaction, as opposed to creation, at least for most users.

Like, sure, you could generate an image of yourself in space, but you didn’t actually go to space, and because that’s not a lived experience, it kind of feels like it doesn’t fit on Facebook, where most people look to keep friends and relatives updated about their lives.

But maybe there is more value there, and certainly the capacity to look up mentions and key terms in group chats could be beneficial, at least to some degree.

We’ve asked Meta for more information on Kai, and if/when it might get a release, but thus far, it’s only in internal development.