India Becomes Meta’s Largest AI Consumer Base

Meta, the social media giant platform’s parent company, has revealed that India is now the biggest marketplace for its AI services.

India has not been the first receiver of Meta’s recent AI developments and new product offerings. However, recent reports by Meta reveal that India has emerged as its biggest consumer marketplace, especially for AI tech offerings. WhatsApp has grown to 500 million users and is the top platform where AI features are frequented.

Meta’s CFO Susan Li has provided the latest official information, saying, “We’re seeing particularly promising signs on WhatsApp in terms of retention and engagement, which has coincided with India becoming our largest market for Meta AI usage.”

Meta has an ecosystem of social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and now, an added layer of AI features on all of them. In just a few months of launch in the second quarter, WhatsApp addressed billions of queries on its AI chatbot. This consumer pattern has shown Meta a huge potential for upscaling AI leadership in India. 

Another reason for the delay in AI offerings in India was the recent national elections. Its latest Llama 3.1 LLM model backs Meta’s AI features. Its earlier versions have a strong reputation for misrepresenting information specific to Indian aspects like culture, ethnicity, and race, among others. AI-generated images could pose a huge risk for spreading misinformation or toppling nationwide campaigns. 

Mark Zuckerberg pointed towards the lack of computing power supply as the biggest roadblock in expanding the user base, especially in a marketplace as big as India. He said, “The amount of computing needed to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times more than what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that,” Zuckerberg said during the call.”

Meta AI’s popularity is closely followed by Meta’s other recent launch, the Threads platform. Threads has grown to 200+ million average monthly retained and engaged users. Young adults are growing interested in Facebook's user experience again, with traction observed in the below-40 age group.