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Meta AI chatbot, powered by Llama 3.1, currently has 400 million monthly active users and is slowly creeping up to ChatGPT in the number of weekly users.??
Meta’s push to integrate its AI chatbot into other services, such as WhatsApp, is reaping seemingly wonderful results. Meta’s CEO and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, recently said the AI chatbot served 400 million monthly users just months after the company announced it was expanding the feature to markets outside the US.?
In addition to reporting monthly active users via the Threads app, Zuckerberg also said weekly users stood at 185 million. This figure is inching closer to veteran ChatGPT, which was recently reported to have 200 million weekly users. Meta reports these impressive figures even though its AI chatbot is unavailable in the UK, Brazil, and the EU.?
In a separate blog, Meta announced that its Llama LLM has posted a 10-fold growth since last year. The company said its free-to-use models have been downloaded over 350 million times since the Llama’s launch in February 2023. It reported accruing over 20 million downloads in the last month alone.?
Meta attributes the model’s success to its “open source” nature. However, there are raging debates about the authenticity of this claim since Meta has not revealed any information on the models’ training data.
Meanwhile, the factor behind Meta AI’s success is more evident. The chatbot is freely incorporated within Meta’s leading services, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, which are used by billions of people across the globe—though Meta doesn’t actively reveal user statistics. Like Meta’s models, the chatbot is also free to use and can be used for purposes such as writing text, generating images, or searching for information from the web (though it may not be up to date).??
Coinciding with Zuckerberg’s claims, The Information reports Meta has already pushed the chatbot to over 3 billion users worldwide. It quoted two Meta employees, who reportedly said the AI had 40 million active users daily. They added that Zuckerberg wishes the chatbot to be the most-used AI tool by the end of the year.?
Despite Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm, 400 million out of the 3 billion exposed to AI paints a less attractive picture, especially considering the tool is completely free. Reasons behind the performance may include a lack of knowledge or hesitation about AI, especially in less developed countries with massive user bases. The Information also notes Meta’s aggressive push — by serving AI results to queries in the search bar — may be the reason behind the chatbot’s low retention, where users try it but do not find enough value to return.?
