TheChek News Flow

A year after Meta Platforms introduced its artificial intelligence assistant, a picture is emerging of how people are using it—and how that differs from usage of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the leading conversational AI.

Most people who use Meta AI daily do so through WhatsApp, according to a person who has seen recent internal data; the second biggest group arrives from Facebook. Few Instagram users are tapping Meta AI. Among monthly users, Facebook has a slight edge over WhatsApp, the person said.

Most WhatsApp users are outside the U.S. and the vast majority of Meta AI’s users are outside the U.S., this person said. Such users are typically far less valuable to Meta in terms of advertising revenue than those in the U.S.

The AI assistant is available in eight languages and 22 countries on Meta’s social media apps, and in English in the U.S. and Canada on its Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Meta AI currently does not have a standalone app. Meta plans to change that by converting its Meta View smartphone app, used to control its smart glasses, into an app for Meta AI, according to an internal memo seen by The Information.

Meta hopes the app will increase awareness of Meta AI and show how the company is innovating in AI, according to the internal post. Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars to keep up with its rivals on generative AI, but it doesn’t now have a lot of ways to make money from it.

The most popular uses of Meta AI are for research and information retrieval, as well as writing and editing, entertainment and creating content, said another person familiar with the situation. In a July interview with Bloomberg, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said many people use the assistant for “role-playing difficult social interactions,” adding that Meta AI offered “no judgment” on what people ask it.

Those uses are a big contrast to ChatGPT, which has become popular with software engineers as a coding assistant. Coding is not among the top uses of Meta AI, likely reflecting its distribution on Meta’s social media apps and on its smart glasses.

Meta declined to comment.

Jordan McGarry is a rug maker in Portland, Ore., who has used Meta AI in the Facebook app several times. For example, he asked the chatbot to suggest itineraries, including restaurants and sightseeing spots, when he was planning a trip to Spain. He eventually switched to ChatGPT because he found it provided clearer results. Another time, McGarry consulted Meta AI about a legal question, but he still had to follow up with Google searches to get “human lawyer advice.”

Zuckerberg has said he wants Meta AI to be the world’s “most used AI assistant” by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT. On some metrics, Meta AI isn’t far behind.

Late last month, Zuckerberg revealed that the chatbot had about 185 million weekly users, not far behind the 200 million weekly users claimed by OpenAI. Around the same time, The Information reported that, as of early August, Meta AI had about 40 million daily active users and about 10 times as many people who used it at least every month.

One handicap: Meta AI is not available in the EU. Zuckerberg has said he is concerned about the region’s data privacy rules, which restrict how companies collect and use people’s online data.

OpenAI has been upgrading ChatGPT—including a new feature capable of reasoning through complex problems, which could increase its lead. Meta plans to announce upgrades to Meta AI’s capabilities at its Connect developer conference next week, primarily to bring the version of the chatbot on its social media apps into line with the version on its smart glasses.

One of those planned upgrades would allow people to speak with the AI assistant on Meta’s apps by pressing an icon in the search bar, according to the person who has seen internal data. Meta has been testing the feature on WhatsApp, according to WABetaInfo. ChatGPT offers a similar capability.

Meta also plans to announce that its Llama 3 large language model, which powers its AI assistant, will soon be able to recognize images—a capability that OpenAI and Google have long offered in their chatbot services—according to the person who has seen internal data. The person cautioned that the plans may change. The Ray-Ban smart glasses’ AI assistant has a basic image-recognition capability.

Llama 3 lags rival models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in terms of quality, according to Lmsys, which lets developers perform head-to-head comparisons between competing models, but Llama has scored better on evaluations of how it answers some types of complex questions.