Meta AI Reaches 500 Million Users, Signaling Rapid Growth in AI Adoption

Meta AI Surges to 500 Million Users in Its First Year, and Isn't Stopping Now

Samantha Kelly is a freelance writer with a focus on consumer technology, AI, social media, Big Tech, emerging trends and how they impact our everyday lives. Her work has been featured on CNN, NBC, NPR, the BBC, Mashable and more. Meta AI, the company's virtual assistant, has more than 500 million active users just a year after its launch. On an earnings call Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta's rapid growth highlights the company's continued focus on advancing AI and developing related tools. "(Meta AI is) obviously very early in its journey, but it continues to be on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by end of year," Meta CFO Susan Li said on the call. The Meta AI milestone also reflects the company's hopes to become the dominant leader in the consumer AI space as it expands capabilities across its ecosystem. Although the company said it expects to have strong return on investment over the next few years as it relates to AI, Zuckerberg warned capital spending will be up as a result as it requires "serious infrastructure." "I expect to continue investing significantly there too," he said. "We haven't decided on a final budget yet, but those are some of the directional trends I'm seeing." Read more: What Is Meta AI? Everything to Know About the Social Network's AI Tools Third-quarter sales jumped 19% from the same period last year but marked the lowest year-over-year growth in a year and a half. Meta is just one of the companies leaning hard on AI technology, weaving it into its popular apps Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. As the company revealed at its Connect 2024 event in September, Meta's goal is to go beyond basic chatbot functions and offer an AI assistant that can handle complex tasks. It's far from alone: Google has its own AI tools, like Google Assistant and Gemini, its free chatbot, akin to ChatGPT. And Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri are task-oriented assistants, while ChatGPT and Snapchat's My AI help with conversational experience. In Meta's case, AI shows up in familiar places. When a Facebook or Instagram user attempts to make a search, for example, they're shown popular AI questions they might want to ask. Zuckerberg noted on the call, however, that improvements to Meta's AI-driven feed and video recommendations have driven an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year, highlighting its strategy to improve engagement and create more personalized experiences. Meta has also seen growth around Threads, its latest social platform, which now boasts almost 275 million monthly active users and over 1 million signups each day. "Engagement is growing too," Zuckerberg said. "So we continue to be on track toward this becoming our next major social app." Meta's open-source AI model Llama also continues to grow in popularity with an anticipated Llama 4 release early next year, according to the company. Meta is training the next-generation Llama models on a computing cluster, known as a group of machine learning models, which he claimed is "bigger than anything I've seen reported for what others are doing," Zuckerberg said. "I'm pretty amped about all the work that we're doing right now," Zuckerberg said. "This may be the most dynamic moment that I've seen in our industry, and I'm focused on making sure that we build some awesome things and make the most of the opportunities ahead."

Meta AI Has More Than 500 Million Monthly Users, Says Mark Zuckerberg

Meta's infrastructure investments forecast at USD 38-40 billion for the year. Meta's Artificial Intelligence chatbot, Meta AI, now has over 500 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's earnings call on October 30, while highlighting the rapid adoption of Meta's AI offerings. Meta AI launched in September of last year to compete with Microsoft's OpenAI and Google's Gemini. Initially rolled out in over a dozen countries, Meta AI is now available in around 43 countries and multiple languages. Also Read: Meta AI Expands to 21 New Countries, Including the UK and Brazil The chatbot is accessible across most Meta apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, with a dedicated web app also available. "We estimate that there are now more than 3.2 billion people using at least one of our apps each day - and we're seeing rapid adoption of Meta AI and Llama, which is quickly becoming a standard across the industry," Mark Zuckerberg said during the call. The CEO noted AI's positive impact across various facets of the business, from core engagement and monetisation to the long-term roadmaps for new services and computing platforms. Discussing improvements to Meta's AI-driven feed and video recommendations, Zuckerberg mentioned that these enhancements have led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6 percent increase on Instagram this year. "More than a million advertisers used our GenAI tools to create more than 15 million ads in the last month, and we estimate that businesses using Image Generation are seeing a 7 percent increase in conversions," he added. Also Read: Everyone in India Can Ask AI Assistants Questions About Health Issues, Says Meta Official: Report Zuckerberg also reported exponential growth in the usage of Llama tokens this year. As Llama gains traction as an industry standard, he expects ongoing improvements in quality and efficiency to benefit all Meta products. This quarter, Meta released Llama 3.2, including small models for on-device use and open-source multi-modal models. Llama 4 is currently in development, with Zuckerberg revealing, "We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster with more than 100,000 H100 GPUs, which is larger than anything I've seen reported elsewhere." Smaller Llama 4G models are expected to be ready first. "First, it's clear that there are a lot of new opportunities to use new AI advances to accelerate our core business that should have strong ROI over the next few years, so I think we should invest more there. Second, our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there too," Mark said. Zuckerberg also shared updates on the AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta glasses, stating that demand remains strong. Meta's first full holographic AR glasses are also in development. CFO Susan Li added that Meta AI is on track to become the most-used AI assistant globally by the end of the year. "Last month, we began introducing Voice, so you can speak with Meta AI more naturally, and it's now fully available in English to people in the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In the US, people can now also upload photos to Meta AI to learn more about them, write captions for posts, and add, remove, or change things about their images with a simple text prompt. These are all built with our first multi-modal foundation model, Llama 3.2" she explained. Li noted that Meta AI is being used for various tasks. "We're seeing frequent use cases like information gathering, 'how-to' tasks, deeper exploration of interests, content discovery, and image generation, which has become a popular use case," she said. "In the near term our focus is really on making Meta AI increasingly valuable for people and if we're successful, we think there will be a broadening set of queries that people use it for, including more monetizable queries over time," Li said. Also Read: Meta Develops AI Search Engine to Reduce Dependence on Google and Bing: Report For a question about plans to build the company's own in-house search offering, Susan replied, "Meta AI draws from content across the web to address timely questions from users and provides sources for those results from our search engine partners. We've integrated with Bing and Google, both of which offer great search experiences." "Like other companies, we also train our Gen AI models on content that is publicly available online, and we crawl the web for a variety of purposes," she added. Zuckerberg highlighted the essential role of AI in products like Ray-Ban Meta glasses, AI Studio, and many other initiatives, saying AI will continue to be a significant factor in their development. Regarding AI's role in employee productivity, Li shared, "I think there are different efficiency opportunities with AI that we've been focused on in terms of where we can reduce costs over time and generate savings through increasing internal productivity in areas like coding. For example, it's early, but we're seeing a lot of adoption internally of our internal assistant and coding agent, and we continue to make Llama more effective at coding, which should also make this use case increasingly valuable to developers over time." Also Read: Meta Unveils New AI Models and Tools to Drive Innovation While the Meta chief said they haven't decided on a final budget yet, Meta has raised its annual spending forecast to USD 38-40 billion, up from the previous range of USD 37-40 billion projected in July. The company expects a "significant acceleration" in infrastructure expenses next year due to expanded investments in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Meta's family daily active people (DAP) -- users engaging with any Meta app daily -- increased by 5 percent year-over-year this quarter, reaching 3.29 billion.

Meta AI has more than 500 million users

Threads has surged to reach "almost 275 million" people, Mark Zuckerberg said. Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Meta's assistant isn't the only AI tool that's boosting the company's business. Zuckerberg said that AI improvements in its feed and video recommendations have led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 5 percent increase for Instagram this year. Advertisers are also taking advantage of the company's AI tools, he said, with more than 15 million ads created with generative AI in the last month alone. "We believe that there's a lot more upside here," Zuckerberg said. Outside of AI, Meta's Threads app also continues to surge. The service now has "almost 275 million" monthly users, according to Zuckerberg. "It's been growing more than a million sign ups per day," Zuckerberg said, adding that "engagement is growing too."