Facebook’s Virtual Assistant M
Facebook released a virtual assistant named M in 2015. It spoke with users over Facebook Messenger, and the AI could allegedly book you movie tickets, tell you the weather, or even order you food from a local restaurant. If you’re curious how Facebook developed a generative AI chatbot in 2015, the answer is that it didn’t.
There was a very early AI system in the works around M, but mostly the assistant was just human operators stepping in and performing tasks for people. The idea was that eventually, M would get smart enough to operate independently, but it never did. M was only released to a small group of beta testers because Facebook couldn’t “afford to hire operators for the entire world to be their personal assistant.”
