WhatsApp’s 500 million users in India have boosted Meta’s AI ambitions.
India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage, Meta CFO Susan Lee said on Wednesday, a notable achievement considering the product launched in India just a few months ago.
People have used Meta AI for billions of queries since its launch, he told me during Meta’s second-quarter earnings call.
“We are 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,” she noted.
Meta first launched Meta AI, which is available across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and the web, in the US last year. The company updated the chatbot in April with a new Llama 3 model and rolled it out to more than a dozen countries.
Although Meta began testing Meta AI in India around the same time, it wasn’t available to all users until June, after India’s general elections.
The company has faced cultural challenges in making its AI more compatible with the Indian market. In May, TechCrunch reported that Meta’s AI was generating images of mostly Indian men wearing turbans. In July, several users on X complained that Meta AI made jokes about one religion and refused to do the same for othersThese results were mixed, and Meta eventually tweaked its algorithm to create a level playing field for religious jokes.
Last month, the social media giant introduced support for languages besides English, including French, German, Hindi, Indo-Roman, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Meta AI is now available in 22 countries, including the recent additions of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico.
Zuckerberg also talked about needing 10 times more computing power to train the next Llama 4 model.
“The amount of compute required to train Llama 4 will likely be about 10 times greater than what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that,” Zuckerberg said during the call.
Beyond AI, Meta has seen promising signs for its social networks. The company notes that Threads now has “close to” 200 million users. Meta said last month that Twitter/X competitor had surpassed 175 million active users. Additionally, Zuckerberg said the company is seeing promising results for Facebook usage among young people in the United States.
Correction: Comments about India and Meta AI’s use in the country were incorrectly attributed to Mark Zuckerberg. The comments were made by CFO Susan Lee.