Meta
AI is coming to Europe almost a year after pausing its rollout in the region due to regulatory restrictions. Starting this week, the company’s AI assistant will be available on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger apps for users in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories. However, the AI chatbot’s functionality will be limited to text-only communication.
Image source: Farhat Altaf / Unsplash
Meta AI launched in the US back in 2023, but had to pause its European expansion after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) intervened. The regulator then required the company to postpone training its AI model on user-generated content published on Facebook and Instagram. In addition, Meta suspended the launch of its flagship large language model Llama in the European Union (EU) due to regulatory restrictions.
Now Meta AI is entering the European market, but with serious limitations. The AI chatbot will be able to help European users generate ideas, plan trips, and find information based on data from the internet. Europeans will also be able to use Meta AI to display certain types of content in their Instagram feed. However, they will not be able to use the AI to create or edit images, or ask questions about photos.
Meta stresses that no EU user data was used to train the AI model. “This launch is the result of almost a year of intensive engagement with various European regulators, and so far we are only offering a text-based model in the region that has not been trained on data from EU users. We will continue to work with regulators to ensure that people in Europe have access to Meta’s AI innovations that are already available to the rest of the world,” said Ellie Heatrick, a spokesperson for Meta.
Meta began rolling out some AI features to its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the EU last November, but the devices currently do not support the AI features that allow Europeans to ask the smart glasses about what they see. However, the company stresses that it will continue to work to achieve parity in functionality between the European and American versions of Meta AI, gradually expanding its capabilities.