Meta releases AI app to compete with ChatGPT
Meta’s standalone ChatGPT competitor is mostly what you’d expect from an AI assistant. You can type or talk with it, generate images, and get real-time web results.
The biggest new idea in the Meta AI app is its Discover feed, which adds an AI twist to social media. Here, you’ll see a feed of interactions with Meta AI that other people, including your friends on Instagram and Facebook, have opted to share on a prompt-by-prompt basis.
You can like, comment on, share, or remix these shared AI posts into your own. The idea is to demystify AI and show “people what they can do with it,” Meta’s VP of product, Connor Hayes, tells me.
It may seem obvious that Meta is the first to add a social component to its AI assistant. It definitely won’t be the last, though. Across the industry, AI chatbots and social media are converging. Elon Musk’s X has already integrated closely with Grok. OpenAI, meanwhile, is planning to add a social feed to ChatGPT.
The Meta AI app puts voice mode at the forefront. An opt-in, beta version makes Meta AI’s voice more conversational like ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode, though Meta’s version currently lacks access to information from the web.
This opt-in version of voice mode is based on the “full-duplex” AI model research that Meta has published. It’s designed to enable “rich synchronicity in the form of quick and dynamic turn-taking, overlapping speech, and backchanneling.” During a brief demo, there was a noticeable difference in the level of personality that full-duplex mode conveyed versus the standard voice mode. Both normal and full-duplex voice modes are available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to start.
In the US and Canada, Meta uses information from Facebook and Instagram profiles to personalize how its assistant responds. In theory, this means that how you use both apps will inform the results you get from Meta AI. Like ChatGPT, you can also instruct Meta AI to remember specific details about you. The app is powered by a Meta-tuned version of Llama 4.
So far, most people have experienced Meta AI through its takeover of parts of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta expects the majority of its usage to continue coming from places like the search bar on Instagram. Hayes says that the chatbot has reached “almost” one billion users this way, though he acknowledges that a standalone app is the “most intuitive way to interact with an AI assistant.”
Meta AI isn’t being released as a completely new app; it’s technically replacing the existing View companion app for the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. A dedicated tab in the new interface lets you access the same information as the previous version of the View app for the glasses, including a gallery of photos and videos you’ve taken.
Meta made the decision to merge the glasses companion app with its assistant because the company views its AI product roadmap as a “software and hardware roadmap over time,” says Hayes. The Meta Ray-Ban glasses already use AI to recognize what you’re looking at and recently added the ability to translate between languages in real-time. Meta is planning to release a more expensive pair with a small heads-up display later this year.
