Meta AI has over 400 million monthly active users, says Mark Zuckerberg

India is the largest market for Meta AI in terms of usage, CFO Susan Li said on July 31

Meta AI, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot of Facebook parent Meta, has more than 400 million monthly active users across its products, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on August 30.

Of this, about 185 million people use the chatbot on a weekly basis, he said. These figures highlight the rapid growth witnessed by Meta AI as competition intensifies with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Microsoft's Copilot.

"...Growing quickly, and we haven't even rolled out in the UK (United Kingdom), Brazil, or EU (European Union) yet," Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads.

While Zuckerberg didn't disclose any further details about Meta AI's usage, chief financial officer Susan Li mentioned during the company's earnings conference call on July 31 that India is the largest market for Meta AI in terms of usage.

India is Meta's largest market with a combined base of over a billion users across its apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads.

Zuckerberg has previously stated ambitions of making Meta AI the most used AI assistant by the end of this year. Today's numbers indicate that Meta AI is already close to achieving that goal. ChatGPT, the current market leader, is used by more than 200 million people on a weekly basis, OpenAI said earlier this week.

That said, it's worth noting that Meta makes its chatbot available across its suite of apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, that are used by around 3 billion people on a daily basis, unlike ChatGPT which is a standalone app.

Meta AI is also available as a standalone website and on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with plans to extend to Meta Quest mixed-reality headsets soon.

Meta AI was first introduced 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 was expanded to India in June and subsequently rolled out to a few more countries such as Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. It is currently available in over 22 countries. In July, Meta also added support for seven new languages including Hindi and Hindi-Romanized Script (or Hinglish).

Meta's integration of Meta AI into its apps has however been met with criticism, especially from WhatsApp users. They have complained about the assistant being integrated to the messaging app's search feature, on various social platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Threads, and Facebook.

Llama's growing adoption

Meta AI's growth also coincides with the increased adoption of the firm's open-source Llama models across the world

Zuckerberg said these models have been downloaded almost 350 million times, with 20 million within the last month. The monthly usage of Llama, in terms of token volume, has also grown ten-fold since the start of the year, he said.

Usage across major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure has more than doubled in three months from May through July 2024, the company said. Meta released Llama 3.1, the latest version of its open source large language model, in July, three months after the release of Llama 3.

Also read: Meta bets on India's AI talent with Llama 3.1, Hindi support