WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. 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 more than 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 attuned 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 about one religion and declined to do the same for others. These results were inconsistent, and in the end Meta tweaked its algorithm to create a level playing field for religious jokes.
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