Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta will offer both free AI tools supported by ads and premium AI services for paying users, with plans to integrate the assistant with Meta’s AI glasses later in 2025.
What to know
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company will offer both free, ad-supported AI tools and premium subscription services for users needing more computing power.
- Meta has introduced a dedicated mobile app for its AI assistant with advanced features and plans to integrate it with AI glasses later this year.
- The company will trial a paid subscription tier for premium features in the coming quarter while maintaining its commitment to serving as many people as possible.
Meta is taking a two-pronged approach to its AI offerings, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company plans to provide both free AI tools supported by advertisements and premium, high-power AI services for users willing to pay.
“I’m sure we’ll end up having a premium service. But I think our basic values on this are that we want to serve as many people in the world as possible,” Zuckerberg stated.
The announcement came just before Meta’s first-quarter earnings release on Wednesday, April 30, 2025. Wall Street analysts projected Meta would report revenue of $41.39 billion for the quarter, up from $36.45 billion in the same period last year.
Meta recently held its inaugural Gen-AI developer conference, LlamaCon, where it launched Meta AI, an assistant that could rival ChatGPT. The company has already introduced a dedicated mobile app for this AI assistant featuring advanced reasoning capabilities, multilingual support, and personalized interactions based on users’ Facebook and Instagram profiles.
The app includes a “discover” feed showcasing community queries and a voice-mode interface designed for natural dialogue. Meta plans to integrate the assistant with its AI glasses and companion software later this year and will trial a paid subscription tier for premium features in the coming quarter.
At LlamaCon, Meta also previewed its Llama API, inviting partners to join a limited-preview waitlist. This cloud-based access to the Llama model family will allow companies to integrate advanced language and multimodal capabilities into custom applications.
This marks a shift from Meta’s previous model-download strategy that has driven over 1.2 billion Llama downloads to date. By offering it as a managed service, Meta aims to lower technical barriers for developers while maintaining its commitment to an open-source approach.
Despite these new developments, Meta’s stock has been down 7.48% so far in 2025, though it remains up 28.89% over the past 12 months.
Via: The Verge
