Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant has surpassed one billion monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
The milestone, first reported by CNBC, represents a doubling of Meta AI’s user base since September 2024, when the company last disclosed it had 500 million active users.
The growth cements Meta AI as one of the most widely adopted consumer-facing AI platforms in the world and underlines Meta’s unique advantage: the unmatched reach of its social media empire.
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Social Media Synergy Accelerates Meta AI Growth
Meta’s success in rapidly onboarding users to its AI assistant is closely tied to its control of some of the most widely used social platforms globally—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The company has capitalized on its massive user base by providing seamless access to AI tools across platforms that users already depend on daily, embedding the assistant directly into these services and recently launching a standalone Meta AI app.
“The focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations, and entertainment,” Zuckerberg told shareholders.
Meta has made it clear that it’s not just competing to be first—it wants to dominate the AI space by making its assistant a routine part of how people interact online. This strategic integration gives Meta an advantage many of its rivals can’t match.
Monetization on the Horizon
Zuckerberg also hinted at future monetization models for Meta AI, which has so far remained free to users. The company is exploring inserting paid recommendations and offering a subscription service for those who want access to more powerful AI capabilities—particularly those requiring more computational resources.
“If we’re delivering value to people, there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations or offer subscriptions so that people can pay to use more compute,” he said.
Such a move would position Meta AI to go head-to-head with other leading AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which already offers a paid tier to access GPT-4 and other advanced tools.
The Broader AI Battle: Leverage is King
Meta isn’t the only player using platform leverage to drive AI adoption. Elon Musk’s xAI, still in its early stages, is following a similar path by integrating its chatbot, Grok, directly into X (formerly Twitter), which Musk owns. The tactic gives xAI instant distribution and feedback loops across millions of users, a powerful boost in an increasingly competitive field.
This is a key edge that OpenAI currently lacks. Despite its leading technical position and widespread name recognition, OpenAI does not have a proprietary social media platform to deploy its assistant at scale. As competition heats up, OpenAI appears to be aware of the gap.
In recent months, there have been signals that OpenAI is exploring ways to build or acquire a social network of its own. The company understands that while superior AI models are essential, they aren’t enough to win the race without mass user engagement and data streams that platforms like Meta and X can readily supply.
As the AI assistant space moves from novelty to necessity, distribution power may prove as decisive as technical prowess. With Meta’s user base now surpassing the billion mark, the company is positioned not only as a front-runner in AI—but potentially the first to truly embed it into daily digital life at scale.
The inevitability of AI monetization also means that Meta’s control of both infrastructure and distribution puts it in a rare position to turn scale into sustained revenue.
Salesforce’s aggressive artificial intelligence push isn’t just limited to its products. Speaking at a quarterly earnings call this week, Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington said the company has “reduced some of (its) hiring needs” as it outsources more work to AI. Engineering and customer service are seeing the most movement, and Washington says 500 customer service employees will be reassigned to other roles. Hiring hasn’t slowed down in all departments, however: Salesforce plans to beef up its sales ranks by 22%.