Meta✴’s financial results for the second quarter confirm the trend established a quarter earlier: generative artificial intelligence technologies have already begun to work, but it will take a long time for them to start generating money.
Image source: Mark Zuckerberg
Meta✴ compares favorably with most AI players in that it is already making a lot of money. At the end of the last quarter, its income amounted to $39 billion (annual growth by 22%) and profit — $13.5 billion (+73%); 3.27 billion people use at least one of the Meta✴ apps every day. At the same time, financial returns from the company’s investments in AI are expected “over a longer period of time,” the company’s CFO Susan Li admitted at a briefing on the occasion of the quarterly report. “It’s not easy to predict what this will look like a few generations down the line, but for now, I’d rather take the risk and add capacity before it’s needed rather than when it’s too late,” explained Meta✴ CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the same event. (Mark Zuckerberg).
He again expressed confidence that the Meta✴ AI AI assistant will be able to become the most used in the world by the end of the year – generative AI, in his opinion, will increase user involvement in the company’s products, but the money will come from business cases: from creating advertising with zero and AI agents for customer service on WhatsApp. Meta✴ is already preparing to train a large language model, Llama 4, due out next year, and Zuckerberg wants to make it the “most advanced” in the industry. But it will also require almost ten times more computing power than the latest Llama 3.1.
The head of Meta✴ has said nothing about his intention to invest in EssilorLuxottica, but the success of the second generation Meta✴ Ray-Ban glasses has inspired him, and the company continues to work on “future generations of AI glasses.” The issue of the metaverse versus AI took a backseat, but Zuckerberg mentioned that Quest 3 sales are exceeding the company’s expectations. And, according to unofficial sources, a cheaper version of the headset will be announced at the Connect event.
In early July, it became known that the audience of the Threads microblogging platform had reached 175 million users – now this figure is approaching 200 million, the head of the company said. The growth of the Facebook audience has also begun to be noted✴, and now it is provided by young people, contrary to stereotypes.