Meta puts Snoop Dogg, MrBeast, and AI in your DMs

While the rest of the tech world treats generative AI as a serious productivity engine for drafting memos, Meta wants to turn it into your next group chat buddy.

At its Connect event, Meta rolled out a massive suite of consumer AI features across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, with hardware integrations lined up for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the Quest 3.

A search-connected assistant and 28 celebrity personas

The centerpiece is Meta AI, an assistant built on custom models leveraging Llama 2 and the company's frontier LLM research. It lives right inside your message threads.

Thanks to a search partnership with Microsoft Bing, Meta AI pulls in real-time web results. If you are planning a hike in a group chat, the assistant can suggest nearby trailheads without anyone leaving the conversation. Users can also type "@MetaAI /imagine" to generate custom images right inside the chat.

Alongside the main assistant, Meta is launching 28 distinct AI characters, each sporting tailored backstories and personalities. To give them an immediate hook, Meta partnered with cultural icons to embody them: Snoop Dogg acts as a fantasy Dungeon Master, MrBeast plays an older brother who roasts you, and Kendall Jenner appears as a straight-shooting friend.

Each character has an active profile on Instagram and Facebook. Outside of Meta AI, Bru, and Perry, most of these personas only have knowledge bases up to early 2023. Meta is rolling them out in beta to U.S. users first, with more characters like Bear Grylls planned soon.

Instant stickers and SAM-powered editing

For daily messaging, Meta introduced AI stickers powered by Llama 2 and its new foundational image generation model, Emu. It transforms short text prompts into custom stickers in seconds, rolling out to select English-speaking users over the coming month.

Instagram is also getting two AI image tools: Restyle, which changes an image's visual aesthetic via text, and Backdrop, which replaces backgrounds using prompts like standing in front of an aurora. Backdrop leverages technology from Meta's Segment Anything Model alongside Emu. All generated photos will carry visible and invisible markers indicating AI origins.

Meta also unveiled AI Studio, a platform that will let coders and non-coders build custom chatbots. Developer APIs will hit Messenger first before expanding to WhatsApp, letting businesses set up brand assistants and creators manage authorized virtual twins.

Why it matters

Meta is pulling off a clever pivot here by bringing generative AI directly into casual entertainment and social dynamics, where its rivals have little footprint.

For everyday consumers, this lowers the adoption bar to practically zero. Most people do not need help refactoring code, but millions would happily generate a custom meme for a group chat or ask an assistant to settle a dinner debate. Embedding AI into apps people already open dozens of times a day solves the distribution friction that stand-alone AI tools constantly struggle against.

It also forces a tactical rethink across the industry. OpenAI and Google dominate enterprise and knowledge work, but Meta owns the conversational pipelines of billions of users. If conversational AI becomes as habitual as sending an emoji, Meta could capture the consumer tier before competitors can build social moats of their own.

Still, we think this approach carries noticeable brand risk. Lending real celebrity likenesses to conversational bots is a moderation minefield, especially if a persona hallucinates or drifts into controversial territory. Furthermore, with most character knowledge bases frozen before 2023, the novelty might wear off quickly unless live web browsing arrives soon.