Meta AI approaches 600 million monthly users with Llama 3.3

Meta has announced that its AI assistant, Meta AI, is approaching a significant milestone with nearly 600 million monthly users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed this update in a recent announcement. Originally launched last fall, Meta AI surpassed the 500 million user mark in October. The surge in user numbers coincides with the release of Meta’s latest text model, Llama 3.3, which is designed to deliver high performance at a lower operational cost.

Llama 3.3 introduces a new 70 billion parameter model that Meta claims mirrors the performance of its previous 405 billion parameter model while being more cost-effective to run. Ahmad Al-Dahle, Vice President of Generative AI at Meta, shared a performance comparison indicating that Llama 3.3 outperformed Google’s Gemini Pro 1.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o on several benchmarks. The model employs advancements in post-training techniques, including online preference optimization, marking a significant step forward in efficiency.

Meta has officially released Llama 3.3

Zuckerberg provided a glimpse into the future of Meta’s AI, revealing that Llama 4 is on the horizon. He indicated that the 3.3 version would be the “last big AI update of the year,” hinting at forthcoming developments. While details about Llama 4 remain limited, Zuckerberg mentioned earlier this year that it was being trained using over 100,000 H100 GPUs, with an expected release for some “smaller” models planned for early next year.

Featured image credit: Meta