Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta AI will soon become one of the social media company’s standalone apps, joining Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, CNBC has learned.
The company intends to debut a Meta AI standalone app during the second quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. It marks a major step in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to make his company the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the year, ahead of competitors such as OpenAI and Alphabet, said the people, who asked not to be named because the project is confidential.
The Meta AI chatbot launched in September 2023, with the company pitching it as a generative AI-powered digital assistant that can provide responses and create images based on user prompts within its existing apps. The company brought Meta AI to the forefront of its apps in April, when it replaced the search feature for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger with the chatbot.
Meta AI has since become the primary method for Zuckerberg to showcase his company’s generative AI technologies to billions of consumers.
“This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg told analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January.
Unlike competing generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Meta AI is currently only available to users via a website and the company’s apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Although Meta’s vast user base across its family of apps can access Meta AI, users could potentially interact more deeply with the digital assistant if it were available as a standalone app, the people said.
In January, Zuckerberg publicly agreed with a Threads user who said Meta should create a standalone mobile app for its digital assistant.
The Threads user wrote that a separate Meta AI app could help the company unify the digital assistant across smartphones and different hardware platforms such as the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, help users organize their conversational histories with the digital assistant and allow for “Deeper personalization and customization.”
Zuckerberg responded to the Threads user with a red “100” emoji, often used in online chatter to convey wholehearted agreement.
Meta also plans to test a paid subscription service for Meta AI, similar to the way OpenAI and Microsoft charge users monthly fees to access more powerful versions of their respective ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots, the people said.
Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts in January that while the company’s Meta AI efforts are focused on “building a great consumer experience,” there are “pretty clear monetization opportunities here over time, including paid recommendations and including a premium offering.”
The company declined to comment.
Shortly after this story was published, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman slyly said in an X post, “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.”
Meta’s push to be the top AI company
Li told analysts in January that Meta AI has roughly 700 million active monthly users, up from 600 million in December.
Still, analysts have found it difficult to directly compare Meta AI’s usage with that of ChatGPT and other rivals because it isn’t available as an individual app.
David Curry, the data editor for insights firm Business of Apps, told CNBC in December that the Meta AI standalone website generates less than 10 million views per month, which he said was “far below the major services (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc) and even lower than some mid-range players like Anthropic.”
India is the “largest market for Meta AI usage,” Li told analysts in July. That coincided with signs of retention and engagement on WhatsApp, Li added. In January, Li said WhatsApp experiences the most Meta AI usage, followed by Facebook, which is generating “strong engagement from our feed deep-dives integration that lets people ask Meta AI questions about the content that is recommended to them.”
Meta’s planned debut of a standalone Meta AI app follows similar efforts by Google and Elon Musk’s xAI. The two recently released individual apps for their respective digital assistants Gemini and Grok.
Google said in November that users could download a dedicated iOS app for its Gemini assistant, following the chatbot’s debut as an Android app in February 2024. Last week, the company removed the ability for iOS users to access Gemini through the Google mobile app, telling them, “To continue using Gemini, download the new Gemini app from the App Store.”
In January, xAI debuted an official Grok iOS app along with a dedicated website, expanding the digital assistant beyond Musk’s social media service, X. People who want to access Grok as an Android app must currently join a waitlist.
ChatGPT continues to be the most popular AI-powered digital app as measured by app downloads, according to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2025 report, released in January. The top generative AI chatbot apps were ChatGPT, followed by Google Gemini, ByteDance’s Doubao and Microsoft’s Copilot, according to the report.
Zuckerberg has been increasingly putting pressure on Meta’s generative AI teams to improve its products, including Meta AI, which he wants to be the most-used chat app in the world by the end of the year, sources said.
Multiple employees working on the efforts said there is pressure to work seven days a week to keep pace in the AI race.
“Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media,” Zuckerberg told employees in a January memo announcing layoffs. “This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams.”
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
