Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday told shareholders that the company’s generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) assistant now reaches 1 billion monthly users across its suite of platforms, highlighting Meta’s ambitions to lead in the rapidly evolving AI race.
Speaking at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting, Zuckerberg framed the milestone as a major step forward in the company’s Gen AI strategy. However, he did not clarify how many of those users actively engage with the chatbot versus those passively encountering it through embedded features within apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Meta’s AI assistant is integrated across its family of apps and was recently launched as a standalone product. On April 29, the company introduced the Meta AI app, offering users direct access to its conversational AI tools.
“A billion people are using Meta AI across our apps now, so we made a new standalone Meta AI app for you to check out,” Zuckerberg said in an Instagram video announcing the launch. “It’s designed to be your personal AI, primarily through voice interactions that adapt to you.”
According to Meta CFO Susan Li, WhatsApp is the fastest-growing platform for Meta AI use. Zuckerberg added that the company’s focus for 2025 is “deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI.”
Meta’s push to lead in Gen AI comes amid fierce competition from tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Each company is rolling out new AI tools and interfaces while contending with unresolved challenges around misinformation, monetization, and social impact.
Google, for example, claims its AI-powered search feature, AI Overviews, now reaches more than 1.5 billion users globally. CEO Sundar Pichai said last week that Google’s Gemini AI app has over 400 million monthly users.
“Google Search is bringing Gen AI to more people than any other product in the world,” Pichai said.
AI Overviews automatically summarize search results, replacing the traditional format of showing a list of links. These shifts in user experience are part of a broader trend in which AI assistants are becoming central to how people interact with technology – not just for search, but for daily tasks, communication, and content creation.
Despite their momentum, companies like Meta and Google face ongoing scrutiny over how AI is being deployed, including concerns about accuracy, transparency, and long-term societal consequences.
Still, Zuckerberg and his peers continue to bet big on AI as a transformative technology. As Meta expands its AI offerings, the company is positioning its assistant not just as a tool, but as a personalized digital companion designed to evolve with the user.
