- Mark Zuckerberg has become “more optimistic and ambitious” about Meta's ability to win in the AI space.
- Meta CEO currently plans to spend about $40 billion this year, primarily on investments in AI.
- He sees three ways AI could become “big business” for Meta in the coming years.
Mark Zuckerberg believes Meta is now the leading company in artificial intelligence, and he also explains how the technology will become a significant source of profit in the future.
The recent release of Meta's latest AI model, Llama 3, made Zuckerberg “more optimistic and ambitious about AI” and said his company's ability to deliver the technology has improved.
In an earnings call with analysts on Wednesday, he said the company intends to make “significant additional investments over the next few years to build even more advanced models and the world's largest AI service.”
“With our latest model, we're not just building better AI models that can build new, better social and commerce products,” the CEO told analysts. “In fact, I think we are at a stage where we can prove that we can build cutting-edge models and become the world's leading AI company. brings us the opportunity.
Another huge expense
Such ambitions do not come cheap. Meta raised its guidance for capital spending this year, saying it plans to spend $35 billion to $40 billion primarily on AI investments. The company's stock price fell 16% in after-hours trading.
The last time Zuckerberg got excited about a new technology, the Metaverse, he surprised investors by spending a ton of money on it. The stock price crashed and didn't recover until the company embarked on a “year of efficiency” marked by mass layoffs and a business-minded CEO.
Zuckerberg made a concerted effort Wednesday to head off panic on Wall Street that the new AI enthusiasm lacks business acumen.
He believes there are “several ways” generative AI can make money, and laid out three specific paths for this to become “big business” for Meta. But he warned that getting there requires a “long-term” outlook.
“Business message”
One way AI makes money is by paying Meta for generative AI tools, such as services that build “business messaging” and help businesses automatically interact with users and customers. Zuckerberg said Meta's AI will go beyond just a chatbot to an AI that handles more complex tasks and handles multiple queries to solve users' problems, rather than instantly returning mechanical answers. I'm thinking of becoming an “agent.”
Zuckerberg said revenue from AI business messaging is “one of the near-term opportunities.” It may not happen this year, but it will happen within five years, he said. He explained that the immediate goal on this front is to “get hundreds of millions, billions of people to use meta-AI as a core part of what they do.”
Ads displayed in AI interactions
Another way generative AI can monetize the meta is by “introducing advertising and paid content into AI interactions,” as Zuckerberg put it. While it's not yet the norm for AI chatbots for brands and businesses to pay for the products they see in the AI results they generate, Meta's entire business is effectively driven by digital ad sales. Injecting advertising into social and messaging products is core to Meta as a company.
AI is already being more widely deployed with Meta's new “disconnected content” algorithm for social media content recommendations, which Zuckerberg said is leading to increased app engagement. As a result, more people see more ads. He said that 30% of the content that Facebook users are viewing is recommended by AI, and the same is true for 50% of the content that Instagram users are viewing.
Sell access to AI models
The third obvious way that Meta makes money from AI is by selling access to its models as they grow. “We're going to empower people to pay to use bigger AI models and access more computing,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday.
At this time, Llama 3 and other large-scale language models in Meta are freely available to users and businesses below a certain size threshold. Charging for access could be a departure from Meta's “open source” approach.
“So if technology and products evolve in the way we want them to, they will unlock tremendous value for people and businesses over time,” Zuckerberg said, adding, “It makes sense to aim for that. I think that's true, and we intend to do that.”
