First Look

Meta AI is a chatbot from Meta — the company behind Facebook and Instagram — that competes with ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Until now, it lived mainly in mobile apps and on the web. According to The Verge, Meta has now launched a standalone Mac desktop app.

The headline feature: you can share your screen with it. Point it at a document, a spreadsheet, or a browser window, and it can answer questions or draft content based on what it sees. It also supports dictation across all apps on your Mac.

For businesses and creators, the app connects to Instagram, Facebook, Google Workspace, and Meta ad accounts. It can analyse post performance and suggest what to publish next, or generate reports and presentations from your account data.

The app is free. It does not yet offer the deeper computer control that ChatGPT and Claude's Mac apps provide — those can take actions on your machine; Meta AI can only see and respond.

Honest read: Worth trying if you are already in the Meta ecosystem and want a desktop AI assistant, but it trails competitors on capability until screen interaction becomes two-way.

Qwen 3.8 27B is a vision-capable language model (an AI that can process both text and images) from Alibaba, licensed under Apache 2.0 — meaning you can use and modify it freely, including for commercial work. At 27 billion parameters (the internal numbers that shape how a model responds), it sits in a sweet spot: capable enough to be useful, small enough to run on a well-specced laptop.

Blogger Simon Willison tested it on two machines and found the results impressive — but complicated. By default, the model is set to its highest reasoning mode, which causes it to overthink even trivial requests. In testing, a simple drawing prompt took 21 minutes and burned through tens of thousands of reasoning tokens. Switching reasoning off brought that same task down to two minutes. Alibaba's own benchmarks look strong, though independent evaluations have not yet reported in.

It is a 17GB download. Free to use.

Honest read: Genuinely good model, but switch the reasoning setting to low or off for anything routine — the default is set for complex tasks and will waste your time on simple ones.