Meta AI

Yes. Meta AI in WhatsApp/Instagram/Messenger and at meta.ai is fully free to use, with no daily caps for normal usage. Meta monetizes indirectly through its broader ad ecosystem. There is no paid tier comparable to ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro.

Meta AI is the consumer product (chat assistant). Llama is the open-weight model family underneath. Developers and enterprises can download Llama directly from Hugging Face or call it via cloud providers — they bypass the Meta AI consumer product entirely and run the model on their own infrastructure or via API providers.

Three reasons: cost (running Llama on your own GPUs or cheap cloud inference is much cheaper than API fees for Claude/GPT at scale), data control (everything stays inside your infrastructure), and customization (you can fine-tune Llama on your own data, which you can't do with Claude/GPT to the same degree).

On the LMArena Text leaderboard, Llama production models trail Claude Opus and GPT-5 by 20-50 Elo points on the hardest tasks. Meta's newer research models like Muse-Spark have appeared in the top 10. For most everyday tasks the gap is invisible; for top-end coding and reasoning, the closed leaders still win.