Meta AI lands in Europe after year-long regulatory delay

However, the Meta AI version being introduced in Europe will be text-only. This means the chatbot will not be able to generate or edit images using AI. Instead, it can only be used for brainstorming ideas, planning trips, and answering users’ search queries for online information. It can also be used to pull up certain kinds of content on a user’s Instagram feed.

Meta has indicated that it will continue working to roll out more AI features in the EU.

“This launch follows almost a year of intensive engagement with various European regulators and for now, we are only offering a text-only model in the region which wasn’t trained on first-party data from users in the EU,” a Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick was quoted as saying by The Verge.

“We will continue to work collaboratively with regulators so that people in Europe have access to and are properly served by Meta’s AI innovations that are already available to the rest of the world,” she said.

Meta AI was launched in the US in 2023. The big tech company has been gradually rolling out its AI assistant to users in over 40 countries, with support for more than ten languages including Hindi.

In the case of Europe, Meta had hit pause on the rollout of the AI assistant as well as the launch of its multi-modal Llama AI model due to regulatory concerns. This decision came after the Ireland Data Protection Commission ordered Meta to stop training its AI models on the public posts of Facebook and Instagram users in the EU amid concerns that it may violate the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation.

Meanwhile, Apple has also held off rolling out some AI features in the EU due to concerns about complying with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), specifically its interoperability provisions. Meta had also suspended the availability of its AI features in Brazil after the government raised privacy concerns over the training of its AI models on users’ data.