Meta launches AI app; Zuckerberg chats with Nadella at developer conference

Working to differentiate itself in the crowded field of artificial intelligence, Meta Platforms has launched a standalone AI app with a social media component to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The Meta AI app, built with the company's Llama 4 AI system. It includes a discover feed that lets users see how others are interacting with AI. It also has a voice mode for interacting with the AI.

It's smart for Meta to differentiate its ChatGPT competitor by drawing from the company's social media roots. The app's Discover feed is like a version of the OG Facebook Feed but only focused on AI use cases," said Forrester research director Mike Proulx.

By letting users link their Facebook and Instagram accounts, the Meta AI app gets a leg up on instantly personalising its user experience with social media context.

Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing it for free as an open-source product. The company says more than a billion people use its AI products each month.

At the Menlo Park, California-based tech giant's inaugural conference, LlamaCon, on Tuesday Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chatted with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a technical discussion around the speed of AI development and how the technology is shifting both their companies where AI is already writing code as well as the world.

Acknowledging there is a lot of "hype around AI, Zuckerberg said if this is going to lead to massive increases in productivity, that needs to be reflected in major increases in GDP.

This is going take some multiple years, many years, to play out, Zuckerberg said. I'm curious how you think, what's your current outlook on what we should be looking for to understand the progress that this is making?  Nadella brought up the advent of electricity, saying that AI has the promise, but you now have to sort of really have it deliver the real change in productivity and that requires software and also management change, right? Because in some sense, people have to work with it differently.

He said it took 50 years before people figured out to change how factories operated with electricity.

Zuckerberg replied well we're all investing as if it's not going to take 50 years, so I hope it doesn't take 50 years.