Major Expansion! Zuckerberg announces Meta AI launching in six countries including the UK and Brazil

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that the company's AI chatbot, Meta AI, has been launched in six countries, including Brazil, the UK, the Philippines, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay.

The company stated that in addition to these countries, Meta AI will also be rolled out in more countries in the coming weeks, including the Middle East and Southeast Asia, such as Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, the UAE, Vietnam, and Yemen. Meta AI will also add support for Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese languages. After this release, Meta AI will cover approximately 40 countries and support over ten languages. However, the company did not provide specific launch dates for these countries.

According to Meta, the AI assistant can be used on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger apps, and the Meta.ai website.

Additionally, Meta AI will be introduced on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the UK and Australia. However, the release in the UK currently only supports voice functions, and Meta has not provided a timeline for when UK customers can expect full multi-modal functionality on the glasses.

It is worth noting that the EU is absent from this expansion. Earlier this summer, Meta stated that due to regulatory concerns in the EU, the company would not introduce multi-modal AI services in the EU. Previously, Zuckerberg publicly criticized European regulatory authorities for their approach to the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.

During last month's Meta Connect event, Zuckerberg mentioned that Meta AI currently has "close to" 500 million users worldwide. He also stated that by the end of this year, this chatbot is expected to become the most widely used AI assistant in the world.

Meta CFO Susan Li stated during the 2024 second-quarter earnings call that India is the largest market for Meta AI, mainly due to WhatsApp having over 500 million users in the country.

Last month, the company added new features to Meta AI, such as support for new celebrity voices and lip-synced translations. Additionally, the company expanded its generative AI-driven "Imagine" feature to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, allowing users to generate photos through natural language prompts. Furthermore, Meta AI can now understand users' photos, provide answers based on the photos, and even edit them.

Moreover, Meta launched the self-proclaimed most advanced media-based model, Movie Gen, this month. According to a previous article by Wall Street News, Meta stated that Movie Gen is the company's "groundbreaking generative AI research for media," encompassing modalities such as images, videos, and audio. Users can create custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and transform personal images into unique videos by simply inputting text. Movie Gen's performance in these tasks outperforms similar models in the industry based on human evaluations Introduction to Meta, Movie Gen is the "most advanced and immersive storytelling model kit", integrating the company's first wave of generative AI media research Make-A-Scene series models, which can create models for images, audio, videos, and 3D animations, as well as the second wave of research models targeting the Llama Image base model with the emergence of diffusion models, enabling higher quality image and video generation as well as image editing models