Comment by modeless

16 hours ago

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...