The Future of Meta is AI, AI and More AI

The good news for Meta is that, unlike almost every AI startup, Meta is already making a lot of money. In its latest quarter, the company made just over $39 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from a year ago, and about $13.5 billion in profit, up 73 percent. 3.27 billion people employ at least one of Meta’s apps every day. That kind of scale and money gives it the ability to make the kind of massive bets Zuckerberg is known for.

During Meta’s earnings conference call on Wednesday, CFO Susan Li reiterated to investors that the financial returns from its recent AI investments “will be visible over a longer period of time.” Zuckerberg was blunt about why Meta is spending billions on Nvidia hardware and other infrastructure ahead of those future gains: “It’s hard to predict what that will look like generations into the future, but at this point I’d rather take the risk and build the capability before it’s needed than too late.”

He reiterated that the Meta AI assistant is on track to become the most used in the world by the end of the year. While he touted the generative AI features, “those are the things that I think will drive engagement with our products,” he said the real revenue will come from business employ cases, such as creating AI ads from scratch and enabling companies to run their own AI agents in WhatsApp for customer service.

Here are some other highlights from the earnings conference call: