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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images


Meta AI will soon become one of the social media company’s standalone apps, joining Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, CNBC has learned.

The company intends to debut a Meta AI standalone app during the second quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. It marks a major step in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to make his company the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the year, ahead of competitors such as OpenAI and Alphabet, said the people, who asked not to be named because the project is confidential.

The Meta AI chatbot launched in September 2023, with the company pitching it as a generative AI-powered digital assistant that can provide responses and create images based on user prompts within its existing apps. The company brought Meta AI to the forefront of its apps in April, when it replaced the search feature for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger with the chatbot. 

Meta AI has since become the primary method for Zuckerberg to showcase his company’s generative AI technologies to billions of consumers.

“This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg told analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January.

Unlike competing generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Meta AI is currently only available to users via a website and the company’s apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Although Meta’s vast user base across its family of apps can access Meta AI, users could potentially interact more deeply with the digital assistant if it were available as a standalone app, the people said.

In January, Zuckerberg publicly agreed with a Threads user who said Meta should create a standalone mobile app for its digital assistant.

The Threads user wrote that a separate Meta AI app could help the company unify the digital assistant across smartphones and different hardware platforms such as the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, help users organize their conversational histories with the digital assistant and allow for “Deeper personalization and customization.”

Zuckerberg responded to the Threads user with a red “100” emoji, often used in online chatter to convey wholehearted agreement.

Meta also plans to test a paid subscription service for Meta AI, similar to the way OpenAI and Microsoft charge users monthly fees to access more powerful versions of their respective ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots, the people said.

Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts in January that while the company’s Meta AI efforts are focused on “building a great consumer experience,” there are “pretty clear monetization opportunities here over time, including paid recommendations and including a premium offering.”

The company declined to comment.

Shortly after this story was published, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman slyly said in an X post, “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.”

Meta’s push to be the top AI company

Li told analysts in January that Meta AI has roughly 700 million active monthly users, up from 600 million in December.

Still, analysts have found it difficult to directly compare Meta AI’s usage with that of ChatGPT and other rivals because it isn’t available as an individual app. 

David Curry, the data editor for insights firm Business of Apps, told CNBC in December that the Meta AI standalone website generates less than 10 million views per month, which he said was “far below the major services (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc) and even lower than some mid-range players like Anthropic.”

India is the “largest market for Meta AI usage,” Li told analysts in July. That coincided with signs of retention and engagement on WhatsApp, Li added. In January, Li said WhatsApp experiences the most Meta AI usage, followed by Facebook, which is generating “strong engagement from our feed deep-dives integration that lets people ask Meta AI questions about the content that is recommended to them.”

Meta’s planned debut of a standalone Meta AI app follows similar efforts by Google and Elon Musk’s xAI. The two recently released individual apps for their respective digital assistants Gemini and Grok.

Google said in November that users could download a dedicated iOS app for its Gemini assistant, following the chatbot’s debut as an Android app in February 2024. Last week, the company removed the ability for iOS users to access Gemini through the Google mobile app, telling them, “To continue using Gemini, download the new Gemini app from the App Store.”

In January, xAI debuted an official Grok iOS app along with a dedicated website, expanding the digital assistant beyond Musk’s social media service, X. People who want to access Grok as an Android app must currently join a waitlist.

ChatGPT continues to be the most popular AI-powered digital app as measured by app downloads, according to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2025 report, released in January. The top generative AI chatbot apps were ChatGPT, followed by Google Gemini, ByteDance’s Doubao and Microsoft’s Copilot, according to the report. 

Zuckerberg has been increasingly putting pressure on Meta’s generative AI teams to improve its products, including Meta AI, which he wants to be the most-used chat app in the world by the end of the year, sources said.

Multiple employees working on the efforts said there is pressure to work seven days a week to keep pace in the AI race. 

“Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media,” Zuckerberg told employees in a January memo announcing layoffs. “This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams.”

— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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