A standalone Meta AI app is in the works for Q2, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The move is aligned with Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stated intent to propel his company to the forefront of artificial intelligence by year’s end, vaulting ahead of competitors such as OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic and xAI. “This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg said in January during a Q4 earnings call with analysts.

“Meta AI will soon become one of the social media company’s standalone apps, joining Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp,” CNBC reports. There are plans to test a paid subscription to access more powerful versions of Meta AI, similar to the tiered pricing for competing chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the news by reposting the CNBC article on X and writing, “Ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.” Zuckerberg has been posting about the development socially, too. Tom’s Guide points out that he “endorsed posts on Threads suggesting that Meta should make its own app.”

“Unlike competing generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Meta AI is currently only available to users via a website and the company’s [social] apps,” CNBC writes.

Zuckerberg’s take on a Meta AI app will likely take into account his “‘unique vision focused on personalization’ because ‘people don’t all want to use the same AI,’” Tom’s says, citing the chief exec’s comments to financial analysts.

Meta launched its AI chatbot “in September 2023, with the company pitching it as a generative AI-powered digital assistant that can provide responses and create images based on user prompts within its existing apps,” CNBC writes. The company “brought Meta AI to the forefront of its apps in April, when it replaced the search feature for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger with the chatbot.”

Since then, Meta AI has become “the primary method for Zuckerberg to showcase his company’s generative AI technologies to billions of consumers,” per CNBC. The company has also surged to the forefront of enterprise and research-based AI by making use of its Llama model family available royalty-free for many uses.