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Meta has a huge family of applications. Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has made AI his foremost priority in addition to pushing the possibilities of social connection with various disruptive product suites such Orion , which aim to weave AI and augmented reality effortlessly into user’s lives. For AI specifically, it was reported last month that Meta is quietly working on a standalone application to compete with other formidable players in the market such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity, all of which already have their own dedicated AI applications.
But Meta has one key advantage over all of the other AI services and companies, and it is the very fundamental piece that the company has worked on since its birth: social connection. True to his roots, Zuckerberg has bet big on social interaction and connection as the most important frontier and is therefore weaving AI into this world to further enable closer ties among people. Currently, Meta’s AI offerings are primarily only available through its family of applications; that is, users can access Meta AI through Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
It offers numerous advanced features, including editing photographs, being able to tag and query Meta AI directly in group chats on WhatsApp and even use it as a live conversation partner to discuss an issue. Per CNBC, Susan Li, CFO of Meta, explained that the company’s growth has been significant, now with nearly “700 million active monthly users, up from 600 million in December.” Per some additional reports , the company has nearly 3.
35 billion daily active users across its entire portfolio of products, accounting for nearly half of the world’s population. In comparison, it was reported in February that ChatGPT serves about 400 million users per week. This means that even if Meta is able to convert just 10% of its reported daily active users over to its products, it will be a leader in this space by a huge margin.
Both through a standalone app and otherwise, Meta AI has the potential to become a huge disruptor, given just how intricately paramount its core products have become for billions of people globally. For example, Instagram remains one of the most used applications worldwide on a day-to-day basis, and is among the primary means to transfer information and for social interactions. WhatsApp is a massive player as well, given that it’s a unique communication platform that no other “big tech” company has really built out to this scale; in fact, CFO Li has mentioned that India is the largest market for the use of AI, especially given the country’s heavy reliance on WhatsApp as the primary mode of communication.
For practical applications, users stand to gain many potential benefits. For example, crowdsourcing answers to healthcare questions and concerns to the community may become a huge source of relief for patients and users. This can easily be woven into the social connection aspect that Zuckerberg has emphasized with his approach.
As for a purely standalone app, Meta’s learning of human patterns and functions, in addition to the amount of information that is exchanged across its platforms, give it a huge repository of data by which to develop sophisticated training and knowledge-backed responses. But the fight for dominance will not be an easy one; ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity and many more have a huge lead already, especially with regards to standalone apps. In fact, many say that these parties will be able to successfully capture market share because they are hyper-focused on standalone services and thus, don’t have to deal with any other verticals (unlike Meta).
As for social connection, Elon Musk’s X platform and xAI are formidable competitors; Musk has promoted his services as the beacon of free speech, and it remains one of the most highly used and fastest modes of communication and news transmission globally. Musk has also developed his Grok AI tool to be woven into conversations and social interactions on X, quite similar to Zuckerberg’s initial thesis. Standalone or not, the race to the top is just commencing.
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