How does Meta AI stack up in the great chatbot arms race?
Advertisingly. Data-miningly. Like the avatar of rapacious consumption, slouching toward Bethlehem; like a fool’s bargain with the fae; like a self-fulfilling prophecy of ennui, tailored for maximum palatability and addictive potential. But since we can’t get rid of it by retconning Silicon Valley and/or hurling Zuck into the Sun, here’s what you need to know about Meta AI: where to find it, what it can do, and what’s really going on behind the proverbial curtain.
Introduction
Meta AI is a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools embedded across Meta’s software and hardware platforms (including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, VR, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses), as well as a web version and a standalone app. Collectively, Meta refers to this interconnected ecosystem of apps, devices, and virtual environments as the “metaverse.”
This is what the term “metaverse” once referred to.
Credit: Meta
The term “Meta AI” refers to both the consumer-facing chatbot frontend and its behind-the-scenes infrastructure. However, Meta AI is also the name of Meta’s in-house R&D lab, which started off as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research before the company’s 2021 rebrand.
What Can You Do With Meta AI?
Meta’s AI stack is thoroughly focused on social media, so its specialties are right at home on Facebook, WhatsApp and Insta. Here’s what Meta AI does, across the various platforms and services of the metaverse:
Facebook & Instagram
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Search and content recommendations (people, posts, Reels, ads)
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Image recognition (tagging, captioning)
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Moderation (spam filtering & removal of harmful content)
Messenger & WhatsApp
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Chatbot Q&A, productivity help, translation
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Customer service automation for businesses
Hardware (Ray-Ban Meta, Meta Quest/Oculus)
There’s also a web version, which you can find at Meta.ai, and a standalone Meta AI mobile app. Both offer direct chatbot access for general queries, creative tasks, and some light-duty productivity assistance.
The Technology Behind Meta AI
Meta AI is based on a family of large language models known as LLaMA (a backronym for Large Language Model Meta AI). The current generation of LLaMAs is a mixture-of-experts model, three kobolds in a trench coat a sort of committee of smaller-scale, more focused AI tools, working together toward a single multifaceted goal. Most of those experts belong to a class of elaborate software models called transformers, originally developed to perform complex operations on huge grids of numbers called matrices. As of December 2025, the most recent version is LLaMA 4, released in three variants: Maverick, Scout, and a still-in-training preview version of Behemoth.
Credit: Meta
Llama 4 Scout is a “17 billion active parameter model with 16 experts,” according to a Meta press release from the launch. Maverick has roughly the same parameters but relies on its own bespoke internal panel of 128 experts, while the aptly titled Behemoth uses 16 experts but a whopping 288 billion active parameters. Meta also describes the Llama 4 model family as capable of fitting into the RAM on a single Nvidia H100 datacenter GPU, offering a tantalizing prospect for IT device manufacturers and decision-makers interested in AI models that can ultimately run on smaller local server installations or even on-device.
How to Access Meta AI
To access Meta AI from a web browser, you can go to Meta.ai to engage with it directly, or you can check out some AI features that are already live in the web versions of Metaverse apps. Facebook and Instagram users on mobile can access Meta AI via the app’s search bar or by interacting with the AI summaries that now appear under some posts and comments. There’s also a standalone app available on iOS and Android.
For users who have access to the AI rollout, Meta AI is enabled on Facebook by default, so you don’t have to seek it out. Rollout is on a per-account basis, so (at least in the US) once an account has access, it will have access on desktop and mobile devices. The same goes for Instagram. Not everyone has access to Meta AI on Instagram right now. If your account does, you’ll be able to tell by the Meta AI logo in the search bar.
Is Meta AI Available in All Countries?
Meta AI is available in many regions, but not universally. Since it’s still in its rollout phase, some features aren’t complete, and others aren’t yet available in languages other than English. (Voice features are strongest in English.) Availability is tied to Meta’s apps; if you can use Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp in your country, you may encounter Meta AI, but features vary.
Credit: Meta
According to Meta’s FAQs, Meta AI is available in 200+ countries by way of metaverse apps like Facebook and Instagram, while the standalone iOS and Android apps are available in 186. However, even if the AI isn’t available in your country, you can use the app sans AI to configure the company’s Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Some countries—and the entire EU—have restricted access to Meta AI altogether due to regulatory, privacy, and/or infrastructure concerns. Broadly, Meta’s data collection and use policies are in conflict with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That may change in the future, but for now, Meta AI is not available to private citizens who live in the EU.
Open-Source(ish)
Meta has long described LLaMA as “open-source,” emphasizing its availability for research and custom applications. But as usual, there’s more to the story than the corporate press releases let on.
The “open-source” label has received major community pushback from free software advocacy groups, developers, and academic and professional experts. In a January 2025 statement, the Free Software Foundation classified LLaMA 3.1 as nonfree software due to its license, which is incompatible with the GPL. But the line of criticism goes back years, at least as far as LLaMA 2. Mark Dingemanse, coauthor of a 2023 report that started with 15 and now compares 20 major LLMs to see how open their sources really are, had an absolutely scathing takedown of Meta’s claims about its LLaMA 2 model.
“Meta using the term ‘open source’ for this is positively misleading,” said Dingemanse, according to an IEEE Spectrum review of the paper. “There is no source to be seen, the training data is entirely undocumented, and beyond the glossy charts, the technical documentation is really rather poor.”
Later that year, Ars Technica characterized Llama 2 as “source-available,” rather than open-source, and an article in Nature bluntly accused Meta of “openwashing” systems (specifically, the company’s then-forthcoming LLaMA 3 model) “that are better understood as closed.”
What Data Does Meta AI Collect?
Everything that isn’t nailed to the floor. With some very specific exceptions, everything in Meta’s database is fair game: profile data, posts, photos, searches, interactions, hardware information, location data, and a vast subsurface web of weighted social and keyword associations. To Meta’s credit, at least the company is upfront about its Hooverish tendencies; they’re rolled right into the terms and conditions of access for the Metaverse. (As long as your definition of “upfront” includes making you wade through the Ferengi print with a magnifying glass.)
Specifically, Meta collects an array of information, including (but not limited to) the following:
Behavioral data: Likes, shares, follows, watch time, engagement patterns
Content data: Posts, images, captions, and metadata for moderation and recommendations
Interaction data: Chatbot queries, translation requests, in-app searches
Device/context data: Location, device type, app usage (depending on permissions)
Meta has provided little detail about how they make use of all this information to train or refine their AI systems, but we do know that it enables spam filtering, content moderation, and ad targeting. The company claims not to use private messages for training, but still processes data to determine whether it’s sensitive.
Can You Disable Meta AI On Facebook or Instagram?
There is no way to fully disable Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or anywhere else in the metaverse. When Meta AI becomes available to an account, it’s enabled globally by default. There are ways to opt out on a per-interaction basis, and you don’t have to engage with the AI’s chatbot tools, but consent to the data gathering is baked into the core metaverse ToS.
Credit: Meta
Don’t let that make you think we’re going gently into the good night. For more on how to avoid Meta AI where possible, check out our walkthrough on opting out of Meta AI (as much as you can, anyway) across the metaverse.
How Does Meta AI Compare to ChatGPT or Gemini?
Ultimately, the biggest difference between these chatbots is what they’re designed to do, but even there, you’ll find a great deal of functional overlap. At this point, these tools are all multimodal: full-fledged edifices unto themselves, capable of parsing and wrangling multiple media types, such as images, voice, video, and blocks of text.
Meta shares its competitive bracket with others in its weight class, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. However, unlike productivity-focused tools like Claude, Gemini, and many smaller-scale options, Meta AI has a decidedly social-media bent.
Still, there are some meaningful differences that distinguish Meta AI from its classmates. Meta is a social media juggernaut, and Meta AI is built to slipstream into the social media milieu like a fish takes to water. Where some AI chatbot services (i.e., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) excel at drier, more analytical applications such as content creation, copyediting, software engineering, or academic research, Meta AI was designed to manicure your social media feed and suggest friends, track and publicize events, offer related search terms, and use all of that to inform its ad suggestions.
Credit: Kenneth Cheung/Getty Images
Meta AI (LLaMA): Open-source models, integrated into social platforms. Focus on personalization, moderation, multimodal (text, image, VR).
ChatGPT (OpenAI): Proprietary, general-purpose reasoning assistant. Strong enterprise adoption, productivity tools.
Gemini (Google): Proprietary, multimodal (text, image, code). Integrated into the Google ecosystem (Search, Workspace).
Meta AI’s comparative strongest points are scale and integration. There are billions of unique users across Meta’s platforms. ChatGPT and Gemini both offer standalone versatility and enterprise productivity, and it’s true that our Gmail inboxes are loaded with information about our financial practices and career decisions. But we’d still argue that neither of them has anything like Meta’s raw access to the behavioral and financial patterns that describe a person’s life. Meta AI is less about standalone chatbot performance and more about embedded infrastructure.
Meta’s long-term vision for its AI involves more multimodal capabilities, deeper metaverse integration, and ongoing privacy debates. Meta AI doesn’t need to outthink ChatGPT or Gemini; it just needs to outlast them, so it makes like a barnacle on a ship’s hull, embedded in the endless scroll of our collective social life. That’s the real play: not so much brilliance as omnipresence. It’s about who owns the stage we’re all performing on. And in a world where attention is the currency, Meta’s AI is already sitting on a dragon’s ransom.
