Meta Platforms may have just leapfrogged its AI chatbot competitors, thanks to the broad reach of its social media products.
CNBC reported CEO Mark Zuckerberg as saying Wednesday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, that Meta’s AI assistant now has one billion monthly active users across the company’s family of apps.
Earlier this week it emerged that Elon Musk’s xAI had paid messaging platform Telegram $300m (£223m) to introduce its AI chatbot Grok to Telegram’s one billion monthly active users.
Chatbot market
That move came as xAI struggles to establish an edge in the highly competitive AI chatbot sector.
Other AI chatbot players have much less users that Meta AI claimed one billion montly active users.
For example Google’s Gemini AI app is said to have 400 million monthly active users.
OpenAI meanwhile with ChatGPT has over 180.5 million monthly active users.
Elon Musk and xAI (before the Signal deal) reportedly had 35.1 million monthly active Grok users. That said, Grok.com apparently receives 141.9 million website visits per month.
So Zuckerberg’s claim, if true, will be a notable achievement for the social networking giant.
It comes after Meta AI was integrated into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp in a number of markets including the UK, US and Australia (but not Europe) last year.
Then in April 2025 Meta AI was released as a stand-alone app.
The same month Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research announced she was departing Meta at the end of May.
Going forward
Zuckerberg also reportedly said the “focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalisation, voice conversations and entertainment.”
The plan is for Meta to keep growing the product before building a business around it, Zuckerberg reportedly said Wednesday. As Meta AI improves overtime, Zuckerberg said “there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations” or offer “a subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute.”
In February, CNBC reported that Meta was planning to debut a stand-alone Meta AI app during the second quarter and test a paid-subscription service akin to rival chat apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“It may seem kind of funny that a billion monthly actives doesn’t seem like it’s at scale for us, but that’s where we’re at,” Zuckerberg told shareholders.
In January Meta said it would increase its AI spending infrastructure to around $60 billion (£48bn) to $65bn in capital expenditures in 2025, the company said, as it faces intense competition from rival tech giants.