We finally get it. Meta’s recent restructuring which involved laying off over 10,000 employees, many under WhatsApp’s wing, wasn’t the bone-headed move we were led to believe it was. It was actually a genius ploy that put Meta’s strongest foot forward: AI. Specifically, the company has plans in the works to make the Meta AI chatbot even smarter by giving it a decent memory.
A trip down WhatsApp’s memory lane
The change was first reported by WABetaInfo, and spotted in the latest WhatsApp beta for Android 2.24.22.9 update. It will be released to the general public as part of a future update for the messenger. The idea is to make the somewhat lame chatbot a little less so by giving it a personal touch. It’ll do that by remembering the details previously shared with it, like birthdays and food preferences, allowing for more custom responses.
The feature’s description states: “Meta AI automatically remembers certain parts of your chat to give you more relevant responses,” and includes a new command – “remember this” – to let users manually include a specific factoid in the chatbot’s memory. Or, if you’d rather neuralyze the chatbot’s memory ala Men in Black, that’s an option too. WhatsApp gives users control over what Meta AI can, and cannot store.
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Should we ever decide to venture back to the chatbot currently plaguing the app’s home page, it may prove useful, though the chances of that happening are… low.
While the update on its own is a harmless one, dreamt up to give the chatbot something to do, we’re more worried about the potential of making it even smarter. We don’t imagine it’s out of the realm of possibility for Meta AI to one day access users’ private chats, letting it remember other people’s birthdays or something similar, making the feature actually useful – if also a privacy nightmare.