Meta’s Standalone AI App Is Coming Whether You Want It Or Not

It seems Meta isn’t happy with only having its AI chatbot baked into all of its existing apps. That’s much harder to monetise and limits its AI reach to people who use those apps. While that number is likely in the billions, that isn’t stopping The Zuck™ from launching his own standalone Meta AI app to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, according to a recent CNBC report.

Speaking to ‘people familiar with the matter’, CNBC reports that Meta plans to launch the AI app sometime in Q2 of this year (between April and June). This probably doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Zuck’s archnemesis Elon Musk recently launched a standalone app for Grok, right?

AI, but make it Meta

Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy about making his grand ambitions known (has he ever been?). Speaking to analysts during an earnings call in January, Zuckerberg said:

“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.”

To achieve that, Zuck will need to broaden his AI reach. Presently, if you’re itching to use Meta AI you can only do so through the company’s AI website or via the baked-in version in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. CNBC’s unnamed sources say their users “could potentially interact more deeply with the digital assistant if it were available as a standalone app.”

Read More: Meta’s Reality Labs to start work on household robots

To go along with the standalone app, Meta has plans to offer users a paid-for version of its AI offering like all the other big players do because there are, as financial chief Susan Li put it, “pretty clear monetization opportunities here over time, including paid recommendations and including a premium offering.”

Following a standalone app, it makes sense that Meta AI will start popping up in other areas the company operates, including its hardware offerings like its Ray-Ban AI glasses and the company’s Quest range of VR headsets. Beyond just copying the strategies of the largest AI plays of the moment, Instagram plans to get ahead in the social media world by releasing a standalone Reels app in a bid to take on TikTok.

Whether or not Zuck’s plan to become the leading force in the AI space works out, we’re just glad to see him talking about something other than the metaverse. We wonder how that’s going these days.

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