Meta AI has more than 500 million monthly active users, says Mark Zuckerberg

Meta has made the chatbot available to consumers across the majority of its apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, in addition to providing a dedicated web app.

Facebook parent Meta's artificial intelligence chatbot Meta AI has more than 500 million monthly active users, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the company's earnings call on October 30, while highlighting the rapid adoption of its AI offerings.

This figure comes just about a year after the social networking giant launched the chatbot in September 2023, as part of its 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 and was expanded to India in June. The chatbot is now available in around 43 countries.

Meta has made the chatbot available to consumers across the majority of its apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, in addition to providing a dedicated Web app.

Meta AI is on track to achieve the company's goal of becoming the most used AI assistant by the end of the year, CFO Susan Li said during the call. India remains the largest market in terms of usage for Meta AI, she said.

Li said that Meta AI is still "very early in its journey" but the usage continues to scale as it becomes available in more countries and languages. The chatbot added support for Indian languages such as Hindi and Hindi-Romanized Script (commonly called Hinglish) in July. It is currently available in over a dozen languages.

"We’re seeing lifts in usage as we improve our models and have introduced a number of enhancements in six recent months to make Meta AI more helpful and engaging," Li said. In September, Meta AI added voice and enhanced image capabilities in certain markets, powered by the company's first multi-modal foundation model Llama 3.2.

Popular use cases include information gathering, help with how-to tasks, image generation, and looking for content on topics of interest. "In the near-term, our focus is really on making Meta AI increasingly valuable for people and if we're successful, we think there will be a broadening set of queries that people use it for, including more monetisable queries over time" Li said.

In the earnings call, Zuckerberg also mentioned that AI improvements to its feed and video recommendations have led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6 percent increase on Instagram this year. More than a million advertisers have used Meta's GenAI tools to create more than 15 million ads in the last month, he said. "We estimate that businesses using Image Generation are seeing a 7 percent increase in conversions - and we believe that there is a lot more upside here," he said.

Increased AI spending

These updates come amid a heated race for AI dominance between Meta and its rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.

Zuckerberg said that their AI investments require "serious infrastructure" and he expects the firm to continue making significant investments in this space.

While the Meta chief said they haven't decided on a final budget yet, Meta has hiked its annual spending forecast to $38-40 billion, up from $37-40 billion it had projected in July. The company said it anticipates a "significant acceleration" in infrastructure expenses next year due to expanded investments in servers, data centers, and other infrastructure.

In the third quarter, Meta spent $9.2 billion in capital expenditure, driven by investments in servers, data center and network infrastructure. On October 29, Google parent Alphabet stated that it spent $13.1 billion in capital expenditure in Q3, with the majority going to technical infrastructure.

The social networking giant reported a total revenue of $40.6 billion for the third quarter of 2024, a 19 percent increase year-on-year (YoY), while its net income rose 35 percent YoY to $15.7 billion.

Meta's family daily active people (DAP), which are users open to any one of its apps in a day, grew 5 percent YoY during the quarter to 3.29 billion.

Reality Labs, the unit which develops the company's virtual reality and augmented reality hardware and software, posted an operating loss of $4.4 billion for the quarter, as compared to $3.7 billion loss in the same quarter last year.

Revenues were at $270 million for Q3, up 29 percent, led by sales of hardware such as Quest VR headsets and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

In September, Zuckerberg unveiled the first functional prototype of its much-anticipated augmented reality (AR) glasses, called Orion. The device, which has been in the works for nearly 10 years, bridges the physical and virtual worlds by combining the look and feel of a regular pair of glasses with immersive AR capabilities.

He also announced Quest 3S, an entry-level version of its Quest line of mixed-reality headsets. Quest 3S will feature the same mixed reality capabilities and fast performance as Quest 3, but at a lower price point of $300.