India among largest countries in Meta AI adoption, says India head

Says over 4 million entities have used at least one of the firm's GenAI offers

A year since its launch, India is one of the largest countries in terms of Meta AI usage, said Sandhya Devanathan, vice-president, Meta on Thursday. The artificial intelligence (AI) tool, with over 700 million users globally, is part of the social media giant’s suite of offerings, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

 

“India is one of the largest countries for Meta AI usage, which is usage of the AI tool within Instagram and WhatsApp. It has surprised us with the kind of use cases we have seen,” she said.  

 

She was speaking at the Razorpay FTX’25 event in Bengaluru. 

 

“Our commitment to open source will remain and that's something central to what we do as a company,” she added. 

 

Meta AI is the company’s AI assistant offering available on social networking platforms. The feature was rolled out in India in June 2024, according to a company blog post. 

 

It is a large language model (LLM) based on Meta Llama 3. In July, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg released Llama as an open-sourced AI model. 

 

“We've released more than a thousand data sets and models, and we continue to do that to researchers, developers, academia, so that they can all build on AI.  We found it helped make our own usage of our open-source products smarter and faster to execute with fewer errors,” she said. 

 

Multiple versions of the AI model have been downloaded over 650 million times, Devanathan added. 

 

“Over a period of time, you would have seen inferencing costs come down (for companies). We've now introduced Llama Stack, which helps developers actually build their own agentic tools on top of Llama,” she explained. 

 

Devanathan added that the company had provided generative AI (GenAI) tools to new businesses for them to make use of the technology. More than 4 million entities have used at least one of the firm’s Gen AI products for use cases including image creation, testing creative designs, among others.  

 

Last week, Meta announced it will build a 50,000 km subsea cable network connecting the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other key regions in a bid to create oceanic corridors that would ensure high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation globally. 

 

The investment was driven by the country’s growing demand for digital services and reaffirms the company’s commitment to supporting India’s thriving digital landscape and fostering technological innovation, according to a company spokesperson. 

 

In October, the company announced a collaboration with 'IndiaAI' at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to drive advancement of open source AI innovation, R&D and skill development in India.