Mark Zuckerberg Engages with Satya Nadella at Developer Conference

Meta Platforms has launched a standalone AI app, complete with a social media component, to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The Meta AI app utilizes the company's Llama 4 AI system. It has a "discover" feed that shows users how others interact with AI. It also includes a voice mode for communicating with the AI.

"It's smart for Meta to set itself apart from its ChatGPT competitor by leveraging the company's social media roots. Forrester research director Mike Proulx described the app's Discover feed as a version of the original Facebook Feed that is solely focused on AI use cases.

By allowing users to link their Facebook and Instagram accounts, the Meta AI app "gets a leg up on instantly personalising its user experience with social media context."

Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its competitors, making it available for free as an open-source product. According to the company, over a billion people use its AI products on a monthly basis.

On Tuesday, at the Menlo Park, California-based tech giant's inaugural conference, LlamaCon, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg engaged in a technical discussion with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the speed of AI development and how the technology is transforming both their companies - where AI is already writing code - and the world.

Recognizing that there is a lot of "hype" surrounding AI, Zuckerberg stated, "If this is going to lead to massive increases in productivity, that needs to be reflected in major increases in GDP."

"This is going take some multiple years, many years, to play out," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "I'm curious how you think, what's your current outlook on what we should be looking for to understand the progress that this is making?"

Nadella referenced the invention of electricity, saying, "AI has the promise, but you now have to sort of really have it deliver the real change in productivity - and that requires software and management change, right? Because, in some ways, people must deal with it differently.

He stated that it took 50 years for people to figure out how to change the way factories used electricity.

Zuckerberg interrupted, "well we're all investing as if it's not going to take 50 years, so I hope it doesn't take 50 years."