Tons of people use Metas existing products. Like an astonishing amount of people, despite the attitude of the typical HN crowd.
Many of those people aren’t particularly tech savvy, and aren’t hip to the latest technology. By embedding “Meta AI” into each app, they’re reaching an audience far greater than can be reached by most non-Google AI products.
Once they get hooked on using Meta AI (because it was there, and they didn’t know to search for others), they’re reaching may want a dedicated app.
I talk and work with plenty of non-tech-savvy people. They don't give a flying fuck about Meta AI.
The HN crowd is indeed overly dismissive of Meta and their reach across numerous markets, and my experience is not the end-all-be-all of data collection of course. But I have yet to see any casual users of anything who give a ghost of a shit about AI. Like I'm not even saying they're anti-AI or skeptics or whatever, I'm saying: any time in the last like 2 years when some product or another has had some damn AI or another integrated into it: reactions range from indifference to irritation.
Most I've seen is people see it, wonder what it is, ask it a few things, and then get bored with it and go back to what they were doing.
Many of those people aren’t particularly tech savvy, and aren’t hip to the latest technology. By embedding “Meta AI” into each app, they’re reaching an audience far greater than can be reached by most non-Google AI products.
Once they get hooked on using Meta AI (because it was there, and they didn’t know to search for others), they’re reaching may want a dedicated app.