Meta bets you want a sprinkle of social in your chatbot

Meta is scrambling to grab some of that ChatGPT and Grok buzz with the launch of its own standalone AI app. Built on its Llama 4 LLM, the assistant touts personalization and smoother voice chats, but the most visible feature is a Discover feed showing off how other users interact with it, and even that feels more like a gimmick than a game-changer.

Unveiled Tuesday at its LlamaCon AI event, Meta AI is now available on iOS and Android. It's a standalone version of the AI assistant already in Meta products, such as Instagram and Facebook, and it lands in a market already teeming with AI chatbots and answer machines - ChatGPT, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and more.

You can type or talk to it, generate text or images, and continue conversations across phones, desktops, and even Ray-Ban Meta glasses. In short, it does most of the same ...