How Meta’s new AI chatbot could strike up a conversation with you

The new feature is intended to boost user engagement and retention at a time when many leading tech developers are seeking new ways to commercialize conversational AI chatbots, on which vast sums of R&D dollars are being spent. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, will often end its responses to user queries with suggestions for follow-up questions aimed at keeping the user engaged. That is, as chatbots grow more and more sophisticated, their internal workings come to mirror those of the human populations whose data they assimilated. The complex conceptual map chatbots encode, as they grow more sophisticated, is something specialists are only now beginning to understand. “Chatbot” is often used as an umbrella term to describe any software capable of simulating a conversation with a human. Early chatbots functioned like basic FAQ systems, offering prewritten answers to simple, expected questions.

ChatGPT users have generated over 700M images so far

Since then, all the big tech players have joined the generative AI race. Perplexity, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude can all do similar things. But ChatGPT’s popularity, open-ended capabilities and early start gave it a strong lead. Tell your “friend” you’d much rather continue the conversation in another language. You could even suggest the friend mentioned they’re fluent in that language, even if they never did.

• Perplexity, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude can all do similar things.
• About 35% of people in the US have used an AI chatbot instead of a search engine to answer a question, according to a 2023 survey, and another 35% have turned to an AI chatbot for an explanation of something.
• ChatGPT is more popular than ever and logged 3.9 billion visits in November 2024, doubling its traffic from the year before.
• According to the BI report, the performance of Meta’s newly proactive chatbots is actively being trained by Alignerr freelancers to ensure they provide personalized and engaging follow-up messages.
• By analyzing the results of chatbot queries, adversaries can work backwards to determine how the model operates, allowing them to expose sensitive training data or create inexpensive clones of the model.

OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that performs tasks autonomously

As I stressed in my book Artificial You (2019), intelligence and consciousness can come apart. Crucially, this emerging capability to emulate human thought–like behaviors does not confirm or discredit chatbot consciousness. Instead, the crowdsourced neocortex account explains why chatbots assert consciousness and related emotional states without genuinely experiencing them.

OpenAI’s AI voice assistant now has advanced feature

• Just over half of teens responding to the poll said they think it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT for researching new subjects.
• It will help organizations in Asia meet their local data sovereignty requirements when using OpenAI’s products.
• Though reputable companies have safeguards in place, you should always be cautious about sharing sensitive information, because of the risk of data breaches.
• Human conversation tends to be fluid—subjects are introduced, dropped, and then picked up again later.
• “It understands what they’re saying but actually doesn’t understand what it’s saying. So it’s really a test of human gullibility rather than a test of intelligence.”

Since Google launched its AI Overviews in May 2024, the percentage of news searches that don’t lead to clicks on news websites has increased from 56% to nearly 69% by May 2025. Because training them requires unimaginable amounts of data, electricity, and water (for cooling the data servers), the most powerful LLMs are controlled by some of the largest technology companies in the world. But enterprises can also use smaller, open-source foundation models to build their own in-house bots. Privacy is another concern, since chatbots process and sometimes store user data.

In other words, it provides what philosophers call an “error theory”—an explanation of why we erroneously conclude the chatbots have inner lives. Well, LLMs use neural networks, which are machine learning models that take an input and perform mathematical calculations to produce an output. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Gov designed to provide U.S. government agencies an additional way to access the tech. ChatGPT Gov includes many of the capabilities found in OpenAI’s corporate-focused tier, ChatGPT Enterprise. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Gov enables agencies to more easily manage their own security, privacy, and compliance, and could expedite internal authorization of OpenAI’s tools for the handling of non-public sensitive data.

One key topic being discussed is Reliance Jio distributing OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Reliance has proposed selling OpenAI’s models to businesses in India through an application programming interface (API) so they can incorporate AI into their operations. Meta also plans to bolster its presence in India by constructing a large 3GW data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat.

However, users who create an account using their number can’t upgrade to one of OpenAI’s paid plans without verifying their account via an email. Multi-factor authentication also isn’t supported without a valid email. Younger Gen Zers are embracing ChatGPT, for schoolwork, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. In a follow-up to its 2023 poll on ChatGPT usage among young people, Pew asked ~1,400 U.S.-based teens ages 13 to 17 whether they’ve used ChatGPT for homework or other school-related assignments. Twenty-six percent said that they had, double the number two years ago. Just over half of teens responding to the poll said they think it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT for researching new subjects.

It will keep some user interactions within ChatGPT, rather than directing people to external websites. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati. OpenAI has also been hit with lawsuits from Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers alleging copyright infringement, as well as an injunction from Elon Musk to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit.

OpenAI, Meta, and Reliance have not yet officially announced these plans. OpeanAI intends to release its “first” open language model since GPT-2 “in the coming months.” The company plans to host developer events to gather feedback and eventually showcase prototypes of the model. The first developer event is to be held in San Francisco, with sessions to follow in Europe and Asia. OpenAI may launch several new AI models, including GPT-4.1, soon, The Verge reported, citing anonymous sources.