India is the largest market for Meta AI usage, says CFO Susan Li

Meta recently rolled out its AI chatbot in India, the company's largest market with a combined subscriber base of over a billion across its apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads

India has become the largest market in terms of usage for Meta AI, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot from Facebook parent Meta, chief financial officer Susan Li said.

Li mentioned this during the company's earnings conference call on July 31 but didn't disclose any specific numbers or usage metrics.

"People have used Meta AI for billions of queries since we first introduced it. We're seeing particularly promising signs on WhatsApp in terms of retention and engagement" she said.

Meta rolled out its AI chatbot in India, the company's largest market with a combined subscriber base of over a billion across its apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads, in June 2024.

The chatbot was first announced in September 2023 as part of the social networking giant's big push into generative AI. It was initially rolled out to more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Australia, and Singapore, in April. The chatbot is now available in 22 countries.

Last month, Meta also added support for seven new languages including Hindi and Hindi-Romanized Script (or Hinglish), as it escalated the AI chatbot race with rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot.

With this launch, people will be able to interact with Meta AI across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook in Hindi, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish with plans to add support for more languages in the future.

This launch coincided with Meta releasing Llama 3.1, the latest version of its open source large language model, three months after the release of Llama 3.

"(Meta AI) is on track to achieve our goal of becoming the most used AI assistant by the end of the year. We have an exciting roadmap ahead of things that we want to add...it's improving quickly both in intelligence and features" Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings call.

Read: Meta's Threads set to hit 200 million monthly active users, says Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg said that some of Meta AI's use cases are utilitarian, such as searching for information or role-playing difficult conversations before having them with another person. Others are more creative, like the new 'Imagine Yourself' feature that lets people create AI-generated images of themselves in any place, era or style of their choice.

Earlier this week, Meta launched AI Studio that lets people create AI agents to interact with across the company's apps. Meta first announced this feature in September 2023.

"An important part of our vision is that we're not just creating a single AI, but enabling lots of people to create their own AIs," Zuckerberg said during the call.

The Meta chief mentioned that creators on the company's platforms will especially find this feature valuable.

"There are millions of creators across our apps -- and these are people who want to engage more with their communities and their communities want to engage more with them -- but there are only so many hours in the day. Now they will be able to use AI Studio to create AI agents that can channel them to chat with their community, answer people’s questions, create content, and more" Zuckerberg said.

Another big focus area will be businesses. In June, Meta introduced the ability for small businesses that are using the WhatsApp Business app to activate an AI agent that can act on their behalf, answer questions and provide the necessary support to their customers.

At the time, Zuckerberg said the firm will be testing this feature with a select number of English language businesses in India and Singapore, with plans to expand to businesses in Brazil soon.

"Our goal is to make it easy for every small business, and eventually every business, to pull all their content and catalog into an AI agent that drives sales and saves them money. When this is working at scale, I expect it to dramatically accelerate our business messaging revenue" he said during the earnings call on July 31.

Read: Facebook parent Meta sees strong global ad sales while keeping AI costs in check

Last week, Moneycontrol also reported that Meta is tapping into India's expanding AI developer base to boost adoption for Llama 3.1 which is touted as the first "frontier-level" open-source AI model capable of matching the performance of leading proprietary foundation models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

The Llama 3.1 model includes support for Hindi and seven other languages. It will be offered in three variants: a flagship model with 405 billion parameters, along with updated versions of existing 8 billion and 70 billion parameters.

"I think we're going to look back at Llama 3.1 as an inflection point in the industry where open source AI started to become the industry standard, just like Linux is" Zuckerberg said during the earnings call.