Meta might turn to Google for improved AI experience on WhatsApp, Instagram

Meta apps

According to a report from The Information, Meta has explored the idea of plugging Google’s Gemini into its Meta AI chatbot to handle conversational, text-based search queries. The company has also held discussions about using OpenAI’s models to enhance AI tools inside its apps, the report said.

A Meta spokesperson described the company’s strategy as an “all-of-the-above approach” to building AI products. That means partnerships alongside in-house development, with the goal of sharpening its Llama family of models over time. The use of external AI systems, insiders suggest, is meant as a stopgap — a way to quickly improve user-facing features while Llama catches up to industry leaders.

Meta’s employees already have access to Anthropic’s models, which help run an internal coding assistant. At the same time, the company has been aggressively recruiting talent from Google and OpenAI, offering big compensation packages to staff its new Superintelligence Lab, which is focused on frontier AI research.

By experimenting with outside models, Meta gains two advantages: it can keep its consumer apps competitive in the short term, and it buys time to refine its own systems. But the approach also underscores how far Meta still has to go before Llama can rival ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude in versatility and scale.