It was reported late yesterday that Meta AI will soon become one of the social media company’s standalone apps, joining Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

CNBC has learned that Meta intends to debut a Meta AI standalone app during the second quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. It marks a major step in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to make his company the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the year, ahead of competitors such as OpenAI and Alphabet.

The Meta AI chatbot launched in September 2023, with the company pitching it as a generative AI-powered digital assistant that could provide responses and create images based on user prompts within its existing apps. The company brought Meta AI to the forefront of its apps in April, when it replaced the search feature for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger with the chatbot. 

Meta AI has since become the primary method for Zuckerberg to showcase his company’s generative AI technologies to billions of consumers.

“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,” Zuckerberg told analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January.

Unlike competing generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Meta AI is currently only available to users via a website and the company’s apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Although Meta’s vast user base across its family of apps can access Meta AI, users could potentially interact more deeply with the digital assistant if it were available as a standalone app, the people said.

Meta also plans to test a paid subscription service for Meta AI, similar to the way OpenAI and Microsoft charge users monthly fees to access more powerful versions of their respective ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots, the people said. For more on this, read the full CNBC report.