OpenAI, Meta flex muscles as AI race heats up

The world's largest AI companies are releasing new usage data, showing significant growth as competition in the generative artificial intelligence sector intensifies.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, told U.S. media on Thursday that the usage of its iconic chatbot had more than doubled since November, reaching 200 million active monthly users.

Facebook-owner Meta meanwhile on Friday said that usage of AI features across its platforms had jumped to 400 million monthly users and 185 million on a weekly basis. The use of AI by Meta's more than three billion users was "growing quickly, and we haven't even rolled out in UK, Brazil, or EU yet," CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads.

The company also said that use of its company-built Llama model on the major cloud service providers had doubled between May and July with the release of its latest update.

The pressure to show that ChatGPT-style AI chatbots are being adopted by the wider public is significant given the huge costs of delivering the technology.

The numbers could help quiet the small but growing group of naysayers that are asking to see bigger and quicker revenue from AI chatbots and other tools. 

Most companies using AI models access them through the world's leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google – instead of installing them on their own servers.

Llama, which is available for free, competes directly with the models that power ChatGPT or Google's Gemini that are also made available to companies for a fee through the cloud providers.

Microsoft, which builds its AI tools from OpenAI's technology, said in its latest earnings call that usage of its Copilot chatbot by business customers had increased 60 percent in just three months.

It added that overall web users have used Copilot to create over 12 billion images and conduct 13 billion chats to date and numbers were up 150 percent since the start of the calendar year.

Google, despite pioneering much of generative AI's capabilities over the years, has been criticized for lagging behind its rivals in deploying AI and making errors when it did.

The search engine giant last month said its Gemini chatbot was now included across all its products (such as Gmail or Google Maps) and on Thursday said it was again making its AI image generator available to Gemini's premium and business customers.

Earlier this year, Google suspended generating images of people after discovering that Gemini was creating diverse but historically inaccurate images, such as Asian Nazis during World War II or a Black George Washington.