If the Meta brand weren't so tarnished, one could see its standalone AI app doing fairly well. But will anyone actually care or use this thing?

Now that the whole metaverse thing is on the back burner, Meta has gone whole hog on the AI tip in the hopes of competing with tools and chatbots created by Google, Anthropic, ChatGPT, and X. But Meta's Llama — that's actually what the company's large language model technology is called — hasn't exactly caught on as far we've heard, and they're now launching a standalone Meta AI app in the hope that people will use it like they use ChatGPT.

Meta AI was unveiled Tuesday at LlamaCon — again, we kid you not — and as TechCrunch reports, Meta's sales pitch for the standalone app may be its own undoing.

"Meta AI is designed to be your personal AI — that means, first, it’s designed around voice conversations," says Mark Zuckerberg in an Instagram video. "You’re going to be able to let Meta AI know a whole lot about you and the people you care about across our apps if you want." (Italics ours.)

Meta is trying to sell people on the idea that Meta AI will be superior to apps like ChatGPT because the company's deep trove of data on us all means it already knows what you like and who you are. Meta AI, therefore, will be a better AI assistant because it will assist you based "on information you’ve already chosen to share on Meta products." And this of course means that whatever you use the chatbot for will be added to the data it uses to advertise products to you, and that it shares with "partners."

Meta AI features a Discovery feed where users can opt to share queries they makes to the chatbot with their friends — and this is where Meta seems to be operating in a utopian universe where people's thoughts and interactions are all spunky and wholesome.

Example queries include "Describe me in three emojis," and the response includes the question, "Do these emojis match your awesome personality and interests?" Would Meta AI ask me the same thing if my interests were crypto, fat-shaming, and fight videos?

Meta claims that Llama, which is ostensibly open-source but not really, has been downloaded 1.2 billion times, up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024. Meta AI is being powered by Llama 4, which is its latest release of the model.

Meta's AI bot has actually been available for months in Messenger and elsewhere. But is anyone really using it? Earlier this month, TechCrunch noted that ChatGPT's brand recognition in the AI space, two and a half years after launch, has made it hard to compete with so far — and it became the most downloaded app globally, beating out TikTok, in March. OpenAI says that they're aiming to see 1 billion regular users of ChatGPT by the end of the year, and as of February it was seeing 400 million users weekly.

The new Meta AI app is also being released alongside a companion app for Meta's AI Ray-Ban glasses, and this does look like it could be helpful when traveling in foreign countries where you don't know the language — but pretty soon most countries probably won't be letting Americans in anymore, so...

Related: Meta Faces the Antitrust Lawsuit Mark Zuckerberg Never Wanted