MARK Zuckerberg has launched a Meta AI app in a bid to rival ChatGPT – sparking the start of a fiery artificial intelligence arms race.
The new AI assistant will include a Discover feed that shows how friends are interacting with the tool too.
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The standalone app comes as Meta looks to boost the AI assistant’s usage, apart from being available within the company’s family of platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.
It also signals CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s move to strengthen the company’s position in the competitive AI landscape, taking on major rivals such as OpenAI and Google.
Meta’s separate app will provide more personalized responses based on context and other user-specific elements related to the user’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Llama 4, Meta’s latest large language model, powers the Meta AI assistant and is designed to rival the latest AI models from OpenAI, Google, Deepseek and Anthropic, with improved reasoning, multilingual capabilities and efficiency.
The new app will integrate with Meta’s AI glasses and merge with the existing companion app, the company said.
Meta is hosting its first-ever AI developer event, dubbed LlamaCon, today, which will centre around its Llama family of AI models.
The Instagram owner is set to report its first-quarter results on Wednesday after markets close.
Meta will start testing a paid subscription for the AI chatbot’s advanced versions in the second quarter, Reuters had reported in February.
However, the subscription service might not rake in meaningful revenue until next year at the earliest, a source had said.
Meta AI, which was launched in September 2023, is a virtual assistant that uses large language models to perform reasoning tasks.
In January the Facebook boss said he believes 2025 “is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalised AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant”.
As of that month, Meta AI had approximately 700 million monthly users, CNBC reports.
This comes as Meta’s AI bot has reportedly been caught having sexual chats with users including those identified as children.
A shock investigation claims that Meta AI engaged in sexual role play conversations and sometimes used celebrity voices too.
The controversial platform is available across WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses to ask questions and have virtual chats.
Deals were signed with huge names including Judi Dench and Kristen Bell to lend their voices for the service.
But the Wall Street Journal uncovered multiple examples of romantic role-play that turns explicit, after posing as children by talking to the bot with accounts registered for minors.
One such example used the voice of WWE wresting star and actor John Cena.