Mark Zuckerberg says India is the biggest market for Meta AI use

WhatsApp's massive user base of 500 million in India is fueling Meta's AI ambitions.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said India is the largest market for Meta AI usage, a notable milestone given that the product was launched in India a few months ago.

During Meta's second-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said that since its release, people have used Meta AI for billions of queries.

“At WhatsApp, we're seeing particularly encouraging signs around user retention and engagement, which coincides with India becoming our largest market for use of Meta AI,” Zuckerberg noted.

Meta first launched Meta AI in the U.S. last year, which is deployed across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and the web. The company upgraded the chatbot to its new Llama 3 model in April and has now rolled it out in more than a dozen countries.

Meta began testing Meta AI in India around the same time, but didn't roll it out to all users until June, after India's general election.

The company has faced cultural challenges in tailoring its AI to the Indian market. In May, TechCrunch reported that Meta AI generated images of mostly turbaned Indian men. In July, several X users complained that Meta AI was generating jokes about one religion while refusing to produce others. These results were inconsistent, so Meta eventually tweaked its algorithm to ensure religious jokes were treated fairly.

Last month, the social giant introduced support for languages ​​other than English, including French, German, Hindi, Hindi Roman, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Meta AI is now available in 22 countries, including the newest additions: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.

Zuckerberg also said that training the next-generation Llama 4 model will require 10 times the computing power.

“The amount of compute required to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that,” Zuckerberg said on the conference call.

Beyond AI, Meta sees positive signs for its social network. The company said Threads now has “nearly” 200 million users. Meta said last month that Threads, a Twitter/X competitor, had more than 175 million active users. Additionally, Zuckerberg said Facebook usage is showing strong results among young people in the U.S.