Meta AI Finally Arrives in Europe, Overcoming Regulatory Hurdles
meta ai Finally arrived in Europe eight months after Facebook owners announced Delayed AI Tools Launch Due to regulatory issues.
In addition to 41 European countries, Meta AI will also be launched on 21 overseas territories, the service’s most important international expansion to date. Meta AI is already available through multiple platforms in the UK, including Instagram, but will now also be used in the popular messaging service WhatsApp.
The multi-modal multilingual AI assistant is located within Meta’s app, allowing you to make calls to complete various tasks, such as planning content related to the trip you want to do or brainstorm planning in a group chat. Assistant’s chat feature will also be available in six new European languages as part of the EU extension of Meta AI.
Given that META AI was launched in the United States in September 2023, Europeans have experienced significant waits to be able to enjoy the same AI experience on Facebook and Messenger with friends across the Atlantic Ocean. But Meta is far from the only company that struggles to deal with how European regulations affect the launch of AI tools. In EU countries, Apple intelligence is still unavailable, although the company has said European-wide releases are scheduled for April. Both companies are struggling in a regulatory environment in Europe that prioritizes people’s data privacy (making training models harder) and upgrades the competitive environment between technology giants and small companies.
Funge CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former global affairs president Nick Clegg have been speaking out about EU regulators being slow to allow the company’s European meta-AI. Zuckerberg said last December It’s “sad” Europeans were left behind. Still, the company has been persistent and has now reached a point where it is confident it can launch Meta AI in the region while following the rules.
“We have been working to find a way to bring Meta AI to the EU, which is in line with Europe’s decentralized and unpredictable regulatory regimes,” a Meta spokesman said. “This release comes after nearly a year of intensive interactions with various European regulators and for now we only provide a text-only model in the region, which has not yet been trained on first-party data for EU users.”
The spokesman added that the company will continue to work with regulators so that people in Europe can “access and be properly provided to the rest of the world by Meta’s AI Innovations.”
