Meta AI now has 1 billion active users globally, set to introduce subscription service

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has revealed that the company’s AI chatbot, Meta AI, now has one billion active users across its apps. The new milestone doubles the 500 million monthly active users it had back in September 2024.

While revealing the figure at the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, Zuckerberg explained that the focus going forward is to enhance the user experience and make Meta AI atop leading personal AI while it focuses on personalisation, voice conversations, and entertainment. 

In comparison, ChatGPT has 400 million weekly active users worldwide and around 10 million paying subscribers, while the Gemini app has over 400 million monthly active users, according to their records as of early May.

Since its official launch with a voice assistant on the second-generation of Ray-Ban Meta on September 27, 2023, the company has continued to strengthen its position in the competitive AI landscape, with major rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Zuckerberg highlighted that Meta plans to keep building out the AI assistant before creating a business around it. As Meta AI improves over time, he said there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations or offer a subscription service so that people can pay to use more features.

“It may seem kind of funny that a billion monthly activities doesn’t seem like it’s at scale for us, but that’s where we’re at,” Zuckerberg told shareholders.

Unlike other competitors in the AI chatbot, Meta AI’s usage has been free to all users across its group of applications – WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. If Meta were to launch a paid subscription service, it would be looking to compete to sustain its active users and gain more amid other popular AI chat apps.

Also Read: NDPC to explore dialogue with Meta amid exit threat over $255 million data breach row.

Also in the shareholder meeting, Meta’s investors voted on 14 different items related to the company’s business, nine of which were shareholder proposals covering topics such as child safety, greenhouse gas emissions, and a proposed bitcoin treasury assessment.

Following a series of votes, some investors recommended that the company end its dual-class share structure, which gives Zuckerberg significant voting power. While analysts explained that this is unlikely to pass, the voting items that the board favoured include those on approving the company’s board of directors’ nominees and an equity incentive plan.

Meta’s standalone app

The company’s latest milestone comes a month after it launched a stand-alone Meta AI assistance as it looks to offer generative AI-backed services similar to those offered by Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

Powered by Llama 4, the company’s latest large language model, Meta AI is designed to rival the latest AI models from OpenAI, Google, Deepseek, and Anthropic, with improved reasoning, multilingual capabilities, and efficiency. 

The company explained that the chatbot will remember details, for example, the user’s travel interests or preferred language learning. If a user’s account is linked to their Facebook and Instagram accounts through the Accounts Centre, the updated AI can draw from both to enhance its understanding of users’ preferences. The new app will also integrate with Meta’s AI glasses and merge with the existing companion app.

“People can choose to experience a personal AI designed around voice conversations with Meta AI inside a standalone app. This release is the first version, and we’re excited to get this in people’s hands and gather their feedback,” the company said in April, noting that more updates will come soon.

The tech giant also stated that the AI assistance integration of Llama 4 helps users solve problems, navigate their daily questions, and better understand their surroundings. “With the ability to search across the web, it can help you get recommendations, deep dive on a topic, and stay connected with your friends and family,” it added.

However, the company admits that the feature is experimental and may have some technical issues or inconsistencies, which will improve with time.  Currently, the voice interactions and the full duplex demo features are available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.