WhatsApp’s massive 500 million user in India has supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage, a notable milestone considering the product launched in India just a few months ago.
Zuckerberg said during Meta’s second-quarter earnings call that people have used Meta AI for billions of queries since the launch.
“We’re seeing particularly promising signs on WhatsApp in terms of retention and engagement, which has coincided with India becoming our largest market for Meta AI usage,” Zuckerberg noted.
Meta first launched Meta AI, which is present across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and the web, in the United States last year. The company upgraded the chatbot in April with the new Llama 3 model and rolled it out in over a dozen countries.
While Meta started testing Meta AI in India around the same time, it wasn’t available to all users until June, after India’s general elections were completed.
The company has faced cultural challenges in making AI more tuned to the Indian market. In May, TechCrunch reported that Meta AI-generated images of Indian men predominantly with turbans. In July, several users on X complained that Meta AI generated jokes on one religion and declined to do that for some others. These results were inconsistent, and in the end Meta tweaked its algorithm to make it a level playing field for religious jokes.
Last month, the social giant introduced support for languages apart from English, including French, German, Hindi, Hindi-Romanized Script, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Meta AI is now available in 22 countries, including recent additions of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.
Zuckerberg also talked about needing 10 times the computing power to train the next Llama 4 model.
“The amount of computing needed to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times more than what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that,” Zuckerberg said during the call.
Apart from AI, Meta saw promising signs for its social networks. The company noted that Threads now has “almost” 200 million users. Meta said last month that the Twitter/X rival had passed 175 million active users. Additionally, Zuckerberg mentioned that the company is seeing promising results of Facebook usage among young adults in the U.S.
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