Meta is playing the AI game with house money

Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree is costing a batch of money. His investors don’t care.

Meta’s banal terms changeable up implicit 10 percent connected Wednesday aft the institution reported better-than-expected earnings. Revenue generated successful the 2nd 4th was $47.5 billion, up 22 percent from a twelvemonth ago. Daily users crossed Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp grew to astir 3.5 billion. Meta besides warned Wall Street that it would walk much connected information centers and hiring adjacent year. In effect to each this, the company’s valuation accrued by implicit $175 billion, oregon much than 12 Scale AI deals.

”Our concern continues to execute precise well, which enables america to put heavy successful our AI efforts,” Zuckerberg said during today’s net call. Meta’s currency cannon is present afloat pointed astatine his caller moonshot of achieving superintelligence, oregon arsenic helium puts it, AI that “surpasses quality quality successful each way.” He bragged astir providing the richly compensated members of his caller superintelligence lab “access to unparalleled compute” for grooming caller models that volition “push the adjacent frontier successful a twelvemonth oregon so.” 

Zuckerberg’s past moonshot was the metaverse, which came up lone erstwhile astatine the precise extremity of today’s net call. It’s excessively aboriginal to comparison the 2 projects, but they stock a cardinal similarity: they request the benignant of backing that lone a institution similar Meta tin provide.

Where AI differs from the metaverse, however, is that it appears to beryllium already improving Meta’s ads business. A caller AI exemplary for delivering ads has driven astir 5 percent much conversions connected Facebook and 3 percent much conversions connected Instagram, according to CFO Susan Li. Large connection models are besides starting to powerfulness however posts are ranked successful feeds crossed the company’s apps, including Threads. 

While Meta is inactive spending heavy connected the metaverse (it’s connected way to walk a full of $100 billion connected its Reality Labs part this year), there’s nary mistaking the information that AI is officially Zuckerberg’s apical priority. This time, though, he’s playing catch-up successful a heated race, not trying to invent a caller level from scratch. The stakes are overmuch higher, adjacent if he’s playing the crippled with location money.