Meta AI Now Reaches Close to 600 Million Monthly Users

Meta has been making impressive strides in the AI arena, especially with its push to integrate its AI assistant into a wide range of applications. The momentum has been nothing short of extraordinary, almost as if the company has been riding a rocket. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg shared a moment of triumph, revealing that Meta AI is about to reach an incredible milestone — nearly 600 million monthly active users! Considering that Meta AI just launched last fall, hitting 500 million in October, this rapid growth is akin to a sapling growing into a tree overnight.

What’s even more exciting is that this major user milestone coincided with the release of Meta’s latest powerhouse model, Llama 3.3 70B. Meta has been quick to boast that the performance of this new text model is exceptional. While it may not have the colossal parameters of the Llama 3.1 405B model, its capabilities are still top-notch. The real kicker? The cost has drastically decreased, offering the power of a motorcycle at the price of a bicycle. Ahmed Al-Dahhar, Meta’s Vice President of Generative AI, caused a stir on X (formerly Twitter) by sharing a chart that clearly shows how Llama 3.3 outperforms both Google’s Gemini Pro 1.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o in several benchmark tests. This was definitely a "quiet before the storm" moment — a surprise yet impactful announcement.

And just when you think it’s over, Zuckerberg teased something even more exciting. In a cryptic Instagram video, he briefly mentioned the next big iteration — Llama 4. With a knowing smile, he stated, "The next target is Llama 4!" He also made sure to emphasize that Llama 3.3 would serve as the “grand finale” of this year’s AI advancements. While Zuckerberg has been tight-lipped about the details of Llama 4, he did let slip that the model is being trained on an incredibly powerful setup — a cluster of over 100,000 H100 chips. Even more thrilling, he hinted that a “smaller” member of the Llama 4 family could make its debut as early as “early next year.” The future of Llama looks nothing short of promising!