Mark Zuckerberg led Meta is planning to give its AI offering by the same name a separate identity with a new standalone app, according to a report by CNBC. Currently, the open source AI is only available to Meta’s suite of apps which includes WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.
Reportedly, Meta is planning to launch the new standalone Meta AI app during the second quarter and would mark a major step in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans of making his company the AI leader by the end of the year.
“This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg had told analysts during an earning call in January.
Notably, the news of the Meta planning to give its AI a standalone app comes amidst a similar move by Elon Musk’s xAI. Recently, the Musk led company launched a standalone iOS app and has also promised to launch an Android alternative soon.
Meta AI to no longer stay free:
Meta AI is also reportedly planning to test a new paid subscription for Meta where it could charge users a monthly fee like OpenAI and xAI to access a more powerful version of its chatbot.
Notably, despite a slew of competition in the AI world, Meta AI continued to stay one of the only chatbots so far which has not been under a paywall despite providing many leading features like text to image generation, voice mode and more.
However, with open source alternative from China, DeepSeek AI, rising in the recent months, Meta also seems to be looking at some revenue generation paths apart from just its social media websites.
The AI race is currently at a boiling point with one launch after the another ever since the rise in popularity of DeepSeek’s cost effective AI models in January. Since then, OpenAI has rolled out its o3 Mini reasoning model and an AI agent called Deep Research, Grok has similarly got a new pre-trained model Grok 3, a reasoning model and a Deep Search tool while Anthropic has launched its latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet model
