Is Mark Zuckerberg copying Snapchat again? – Fortune

First, Mark Zuckerberg copied Snapchat Stories. Then he took its filters. Is he really copying Snapchat again? The Meta CEO is planning to unleash an assortment of chatbots with different personalities on both Facebook and Instagram, the Financial Times reported earlier this week. The bots, which could be available as early as September, will apparently engage in human-like conversations to entertain users. If that sounds familiar, it’s because idea is eerily similar to Snapchat’s My AI chatbot. While My AI, which Snap launched in February, has only one personality as opposed to the collection of bots and “personas” envisioned by Meta, the move appears to be classic Zuck. “Zuckerberg has a history of finding a competitive product, replicating it, and making it better,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. Meta has used this playbook to reproduce a variety of its competitors’ features over the years, including Reels from TikTok, Candid Stories from BeReal, and Threads from Twitter. “It’s proven time and time again to work,” Woods told Fortune. To be sure, Zuckerberg has a well-established track record of interest in chatbots. Facebook tried launching a virtual assistant called M in 2015, and WhatsApp has for years
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