Report: Meta builds its own AI search engine

The US company Meta is working on a search engine based on artificial intelligence (AI). The company, which owns the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, wants to reduce its dependence on search engines such as Alphabet's Google or Microsoft's Bing. This was reported on Monday by the US tech website The Information, citing a person familiar with the matter.

According to the report, the search engine powered by a new web crawler will be integrated with Meta's Meta AI chatbot on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Meta's new AI search engine will therefore provide conversational answers on current events, news, share prices or sports results. Meta currently relies on the Google and Bing search engines.

The anonymous source told The Information that Meta wants to reduce its dependence on its two competitors. In addition, the move could provide Meta with a plan B if either Google or Microsoft or both decide to end the partnership with Meta, the report said.

In mid-April, Meta replaced the Large Language Model (LLM) in its chatbot Meta AI with a new, improved version. Meta Llama 2 was replaced by Meta Llama 3. The market launch was generally interpreted as a challenge to the dominance of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Now Meta is presumably also attacking the search engine market. This market is highly competitive. Google, for example, has integrated its powerful Gemini AI model into its search engine to improve the interactivity of search queries. OpenAI, on the other hand, relies on Microsoft's Bing for web access to answer search queries.

(akn)