Meta chief product officer Chris Cox speaks at LlamaCon 2025, an AI developer conference, in Menlo Park, California, on April 29, 2025. — AP
Meta Platforms Inc released a new standalone artificial intelligence app on April 29 in a bid to compete with other popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The AI assistant, called Meta AI, is built on the back of the company’s large language model technology, called Llama, and had been available across the company’s various social apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. With the new standalone app, users can access Meta AI without going through Meta’s other products.
"Meta AI is designed to be your personal AI – that means, first, it’s designed around voice conversations,” chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted to Instagram. He described the voice-focused digital assistant as a tool that can help users learn about news or navigate personal issues.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT quickly became a cultural phenomenon after its release in 2022. Now, Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman pegs the tool’s weekly reach at about 800 million users. Meta executives see their chatbot as providing a different experience with its voice and personalization capabilities, and because Meta AI draws data from the company’s social media platforms.
By tapping data from Meta’s sites, the new AI app will have a baseline understanding of its users’ interests. "You’re going to be able to let Meta AI know a whole lot about you and the people you care about across our apps if you want,” Zuckerberg said.
The new standalone app will also feature a social feed where people can post about the ways they’re using AI, and will connect to the company’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. "This is the beginning of what’s going to be a long journey to build this out,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta announced the app ahead of its inaugural AI-focused conference, called LlamaCon, in Menlo Park, California. During the event, the company also previewed a developer platform it’s creating called Llama API, and new efforts to improve inference speeds and better detect and prevent AI-generated scams, fraud and phishing attempts. – Bloomberg
