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

”Our business continues to execute very well, which enables america to put heavy successful our AI efforts,” Zuckerberg said during today’s net call. Meta’s rate cannon is now afloat pointed astatine his caller moonshot of achieving superintelligence, aliases arsenic he puts it, AI that “surpasses quality intelligence successful each way.” He bragged astir providing nan richly compensated members of his caller superintelligence lab “access to unparalleled compute” for training caller models that will “push nan adjacent frontier successful a twelvemonth aliases so.” 

Zuckerberg’s past moonshot was nan metaverse, which came up only erstwhile astatine nan very extremity of today’s net call. It’s excessively early to comparison nan 2 projects, but they stock a cardinal similarity: they request nan benignant of backing that only a institution for illustration Meta tin provide.

Where AI differs from nan 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 really posts are classed successful feeds crossed nan company’s apps, including Threads. 

While Meta is still spending heavy connected nan metaverse (it’s connected way to walk a full of $100 billion connected its Reality Labs section this year), there’s nary mistaking nan truth 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, moreover if he’s playing nan crippled pinch location money.