As Meta's first-ever generative AI conference gets underway, the company is also previewing a significant update on its plans to bring AI features to WhatsApp chats. Buried in its LlamaCon updates, the company shared that it's working on something called "Private Processing," which will allow users to take advantage of generative AI capabilities within WhatsApp without eroding its privacy features. According to Meta, Private Processing is an "optional capability" that will enable people to "leverage AI capabilities for things like summarizing unread messages or refining them, while keeping messages private." WhatsApp, of course, is known for its strong privacy protections and end-to-end encryption. That would seem incompatible with cloud-based AI features like Meta AI.

The end-to-end encrypted communication app WhatsApp, used by roughly 3 billion people around the world, will roll out cloud-based AI capabilities in the coming weeks that are designed to preserve WhatsApp's defining security and privacy guarantees while offering users access to message summarization and composition tools. Meta has been incorporating generative AI features across its services that are built on its open source large language model, Llama. And WhatsApp already incorporates a light blue circle that gives users access to the Meta AI assistant. But many users have balked at this addition, given that interactions with the AI assistant aren't shielded from Meta the way end-to-end encrtyped WhatsApp chats are. The new feature, dubbed Private Processing, is meant to address these concerns with what the company says is a carefully architected and purpose-built platform devoted to processing data for AI tasks without the information being accessible to Meta, WhatsApp, or any other party.