Stories To Watch This Week -🌍Meta AI

Meta AI's rollout in several African countries including 🇿🇼 🇬🇭 🇿🇦 🇲🇼 🇺🇬.

🌍 Meta AI Launches In Several  African Countries

This is big. AI in your pocket at no additional cost. Why would Meta give out something that costs so much to develop for free? Let’s unpack!

Last week, Meta rolled out Meta AI, a chat-based AI assistant in several African countries. This rollout was to Meta’s suite of apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The Meta AI announcement from the Meta’s website.

The rollout and integration straight into WhatsApp are big deals in Africa. WhatsApp is wildly popular in Africa, so much so that the three countries with the highest percentage of WhatsApp users among internet users are all from Africa (Kenya, 97%; South Africa, 96%; Nigeria, 95%).

With Meta AI embedded in WhatsApp, it will automatically become the most accessible AI platform bearing out OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

One interesting question one may have is why Meta is rolling out AI for free to so many people, including people in African countries where the average revenue per user is often 30 times lower than in the US.

This question is especially relevant when you consider the cost of building AI platforms. Meta is planning to invest between $30 billion and $37 billion, primarily in servers and data centres to beef up its AI drive.

So what is Meta AI up to?

Well as the saying goes;

If the service is free, the customer is the product.

Facebook is a good example. It is free to use, but it uses your data to sell advertising, which explains why 98% of Facebook's revenue is from advertising.

In this case, Meta is after your data not to sell ads but to train its AI models. With Generative AI, the data sets you use to train the models make the difference in the long run.

To quote an article from Wired magazine;

“Generative AI relies exclusively on data to create content—whether textual, visual, or conceptual….Data makes all the difference—but not just any data. “Everyone has access to the same models, so data is what distinguishes generic AI from generative AI that understands the business and its customers,”

While WhatsApp can't access your normal chats, it can use the conversations you have with Meta AI to improve its service.

What does it mean for you?

While the concerns over data usage and privacy are valid, given the current costs and benefits, I think it makes sense to make the most of Meta AI, especially for people who previously had limited access to AI tools.

To do this, consider also learning a bit about prompt engineering, which is basically how to come up with the right words and instructions so that the AI can give you the results you want.

A useful starting point is this guide from OpenAI.

Thanks for reading!

What You May Have Missed Last Week!

• Part 2 on major telco Econet Wireless titled “Econet’s Struggles Econet's Struggles: A Decade-Long Financial Rollercoaster”. Click on the link to check it out.

What You To Expect in The Next Week!

• We will round up on Econet Wireless and EcoCash in the next week

• We will also start looking at some new companies based on the feedback we have received from many of you.