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

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.”

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.

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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.”