Meta plans to release a standalone Meta AI app to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence will soon become one of the company’s standalone social media apps, joining Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
According to people familiar with the matter, the company intends to release a standalone Meta AI app in the second quarter. This marks a major step in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to make Meta the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the year, ahead of rivals such as OpenAI and Alphabet.
The Meta AI chatbot was launched in September 2023, and the company pitched it as an AI-powered digital assistant that can provide answers and create images based on user queries in existing apps. In April, the company brought Meta AI to the forefront of its apps by replacing the search function on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger with a chatbot.
Meta AI has since become Zuckerberg’s primary method of demonstrating his company’s generative artificial intelligence technology to billions of consumers.
“This will be the year that highly intelligent and personalised AI assistant will be used by more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to become the leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg told analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in January.
Unlike competing generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Meta AI is currently only available to users through the company’s website and apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp. While Meta’s vast user base across the company’s family of apps has access to Meta AI, users could potentially engage more deeply with the digital assistant if it were available as a standalone app.
In January, Zuckerberg publicly agreed with the user thread that said that the target should create an independent mobile application for your digital assistant.
The user wrote that a separate Meta AI app could help the company unify the digital assistant on smartphones and various hardware platforms such as Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, help users systematise their communication histories with the digital assistant and provide “deeper personalisation.”
Zuckerberg responded to the user with the red “100%” emoji, which is often used in online chat to express heartfelt agreement.
