Sam Altman jokingly teases OpenAI's "social app" as Meta AI plans standalone app launch

Meta plans to launch a standalone Meta AI app in the second quarter of 2025, as CNBC exclusively learned.

This move will allow Meta AI, which currently operates within Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, to offer deeper user interaction and personalization.

According to the report, the Meta AI app will also include a paid subscription model similar to OpenAI’s, with plans for monetization through premium services and recommendations.

Responding to the story, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, humorously responded to news of Meta’s plans to release a standalone Meta AI app, suggesting it would be amusing if OpenAI “reversed” the competition.

Zuckerberg has previously told the analysts during the Facebook parent company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January that “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.”

Meta AI currently has around 700 million active monthly users, with India being its largest market. The AI assistant tool has also arrived in the Middle East and North Africa and will soon launch the Imagine Me feature in the region.

The news comes amid OpenAI’s new push with the latest GPT-4.5 model, which Altman hyped as the “closest thing” we have to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Sora, OpenAI’s video model, has also arrived for EU and UK users, two months after its launch.

Altman says that GPT-4.5 “isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks” but rather “a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it.”