The AI chatbot wars are heating up, and two of the biggest contenders are OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Meta AI. Both are powerful and capable AI-powered chatbots based on state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), but they do have plenty of differences. 

I've tried every major AI chatbot out there—and written about most of them—and here I'll look at ChatGPT and Meta AI on their own merits and compare them against each other. Even if ChatGPT Plus is miles better than Meta AI (it is), $20/month is a lot, so the comparison between the two free plans still matters. 

If you're trying to decide which one should be your virtual assistant, keep reading.

Meta AI vs. ChatGPT at a glance

ChatGPT and MetaAI are both powerful tools. Here's a quick comparison, but read on for a more detailed breakdown.

Both chatbots use state-of-the-art AI models

Whether you're using ChatGPT or Meta AI, the chatbot is really a specially tuned frontend interface for a powerful, general-purpose large language model. Both OpenAI and Meta are at the forefront of AI research, so both chatbots rely on the latest generation of AI models. 

• ChatGPT uses OpenAI's GPT family of models. Right now, you can use the multimodal GPT-4o, as well as GPT-4-Turbo and GPT-3.5-Turbo, to generate responses to your prompts. 

• Meta AI uses a fine-tuned version of Meta's Llama 3, one of the best open models available. 

But even though both chatbots use modern AI models, not everything else is equal.

ChatGPT is more powerful

Across the board, ChatGPT is a more powerful chatbot than Meta AI. This isn't to say that Meta AI is bad—I'll discuss its strengths in a bit—but it lacks a few big features and makes more mistakes with difficult questions. 

ChatGPT is multimodal when you use GPT-4o. That means that, in addition to text prompts, it can understand images and audio prompts—as well as respond with them. This gives you way more options, as ChatGPT can help you identify things in photos, answer questions about graphs and charts, and even work as a voice assistant through its smartphone app. 

You can also upload documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs and use ChatGPT to summarize them, answer questions about them, or even turn information in them into graphs. 

ChatGPT is also a lot more extensible. It offers GPTs, user-created add-ons that can do things like integrate with Wolfram Alpha, generate images with DALL·E 3, play games, search scientific papers, and a whole lot more. With ChatGPT Plus or Enterprise, you can even create a GPT using your own data. 

And ChatGPT is just better at solving hard problems. It was able to correctly solve ai^93 +bi^35 +ai^24 – bi^86 = 40 + 20i. Meta wasn't.

Though Meta AI is also pretty functional

While it isn't quite as impressive as ChatGPT, Meta AI still has a lot of power. The examples above are meant to show you where ChatGPT is better, but unless you're really pushing the limits of what LLMs can do, this may not matter. 

When it comes to generating text, answering typical questions, summarizing information from around the web, and generally doing chatbot things, the results you get from ChatGPT and Meta AI can be pretty hard to tell apart. 

If it matters to you, ChatGPT uses Bing as its search engine while Meta AI uses Google—but both reliably return decent results.

And neither is perfect

For all their seeming intelligence, you have to be careful with both ChatGPT and Meta AI. While neither is likely to start spouting nonsense in response to a benign prompt, both can and do hallucinate—in other words, just make stuff up. 

They can also misunderstand prompts and just get random things wrong. 

And despite its multimodal talents, I can't get ChatGPT to accurately solve Sudokus for me.

So, while both chatbots are pretty impressive, maybe go elsewhere for medical advice.

Meta AI can create better images for free (but ChatGPT can create better images overall)

While both chatbots have integrated image generators, ChatGPT only allows you to use DALL·E 3 if you have a $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription. The image generator in GPT-4o (which you can use for free) is better suited to creating diagrams than it is to rendering any kind of artistic creation. 

It's a shame as DALL·E 3 generally gives better results than Meta AI's Imagine model.

Still, Meta AI has a few tricks worth noting. In addition to being free to use, Meta AI shows a preview of what it's going to generate while you type your prompt. If you're used to waiting a minute or two for an AI model to generate an image, it's really impressive. 

Meta AI can also animate the images it creates. It won't always generate the most realistic motion, but it's fun to turn static AI-generated pictures into something more. 

And, again, Meta AI does all this for free. So, despite DALL·E 3 being one of the best image generators around, Meta AI probably takes this point. 

Meta AI works across Meta apps, while ChatGPT integrates more broadly using Zapier

Meta AI is now integrated with Meta's social media and messaging platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. 

As you scroll through Facebook, you can now ask Meta AI for more information about something mentioned in a post. You can chat with Meta AI in Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, or prompt it in chats with your friends. You can also trigger it from the search bar in any app. 

This is by far the biggest reason to use Meta AI. If you spend a lot of time on Facebook or Instagram, its chatbot is right there for you to use without having to bounce off to another app. While its web app falls behind ChatGPT in quite a few ways, there's no competition when it comes to quickly prompting an AI through Instagram.

While ChatGPT's integrations don't run as deep on social media, it can integrate with a far wider variety of apps and services through GPTs. And because ChatGPT integrates with Zapier, you can access the power of ChatGPT from all the other apps you use. Learn more about how to automate ChatGPT, or get started with one of these pre-built templates. 

ChatGPT is also available on every platform. In addition to the web app, there are apps for iOS and Android, and a Mac app that will eventually allow ChatGPT to see content on your screen.

So if you don't spend a huge amount of time using Facebook or WhatsApp, then ChatGPT is just as convenient. 

ChatGPT vs. Meta AI: Which should you use?

Right now, the choice between ChatGPT and Meta AI feels pretty easy. 

ChatGPT is the more powerful, feature-filled, and functional chatbot. It's extensible, multimodal, and generally more accurate. If you're going to only use one chatbot, it's the one you should use. And that's even more true if you're prepared to pay the $20/month for ChatGPT Plus. Access to GPT-4o is far more limited on the free plan, as are other features like DALL·E 3, file uploads, and access to GPT-4 as a fallback model.

With that said, Meta AI has its uses. Its integration with Meta's other apps is handy. It's cool that in group chats, you can have it search the web for you or quickly generate wild and weird images. And the fact that it can create great images for free is a major plus. Still, it's really hard to imagine relying on Meta AI as your only chatbot.

But that's the thing: since both ChatGPT and Meta AI are available for free, you can try both—and even use both. It isn't as if subscribing to ChatGPT Plus bans you from asking Meta AI to look up dinner spots in a WhatsApp chat.

Related reading:

• Claude 3: A guide to Anthropic's AI models and chatbot

• Copilot vs. ChatGPT: Which is best?

• 7 examples of real businesses using DALL·E for visual content

• Perplexity vs. ChatGPT: Which is better?

• The best ChatGPT alternatives