Meta✴ AI may soon get a paid plan, following similar options from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. The company is ready to offer “a premium service for those who need additional computing resources or features,” Meta✴ CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a briefing following the quarterly results. And by 2035, the company expects to earn up to $1.4 trillion from artificial intelligence.
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In a bid to compete with OpenAI, the company this week launched a mobile app called Meta✴ AI, which lets you chat with a chatbot and generate images. The chatbot, which Meta✴ says already has nearly 1 billion users, was previously only available on Facebook✴, Facebook✴ Messenger, and WhatsApp.
OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot all have paid subscriptions that provide access to more powerful computing resources and additional features. Mark Zuckerberg has warned that Meta✴ AI will feature “product recommendations or advertising,” but the timing of these and the launch of a paid subscription is unknown.
Last year, the company forecast that its generative AI products would generate revenue of $2 billion to $3 billion in 2025, and that figure would reach $460 billion to $1.4 trillion by 2035. The figures were made public as part of a lawsuit in which book publishers accused Meta✴ of illegally training AI on copyrighted material.
In 2024, Meta✴’s budget for generative AI was $900 million; this year, it could exceed $1 billion. These figures do not include infrastructure costs: in 2025, they will amount to $60 billion to $80 billion, primarily for the construction of data centers. In 2023, the company discussed spending $200 million on purchasing training data for Llama AI models, with about $100 million to go toward purchasing book texts alone.