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Does anyone else remember "Facebook M"? In 2015 Facebook (not yet renamed to Meta) launched a personal assistant named simply "M" that lived in Messenger and f

Does anyone else remember "Facebook M"? In 2015 Facebook (not yet renamed to Meta) launched a personal assistant named simply "M" that lived in Messenger and functioned remarkably like ChatGPT does today. At the time it was basically entirely humans on the backend, with the idea that they could replace humans incrementally as they collected data. Really ahead of its time. They shut it down in 2018, which seems shortsighted in hindsight. That data would have been invaluable just a few years later. https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/14/152563/facebooks-perfect-impossible-chatbot/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/14/152563/facebooks...

mapmeld 25d ago
Yeah! I think that was a response to a similar human concierge service Magic 2015 story: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/ https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/ Thread seeking a follow-up in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402
tchalla 25d ago
That was the day of Facebook trying to copy WeChat "One chat to rule them all!" Sure!
jamesgpearce 24d ago
That was to be the voice control for the Portal smart speaker before we integrated Alexa.