Meta is betting big on AI. But will CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s investment in the technology ultimately pay off? That’s one of the major questions lingering after Wednesday’s earnings call, which announced Meta’s second-quarter loss of over $4.6 billion in its Reality Labs sector.
Throughout the hour-long call, Zuckerberg spoke about Meta’s business across its slate of social media apps – Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp – and the overall message he kept driving home was the role of AI within the company and for the people using Meta’s products daily.
At the center of all this is MuseSpark, the AI model created by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. With it, Zuckerberg said Meta is hard at work on making a variety of AI agents to streamline workflows for small businesses and enhance the lives of individual Meta users.
“Soon we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want,” Zuckerberg said.
If you’ve been paying attention to all the Zuckerberg news that’s fit to print, you may know that Meta’s CEO has been building a personal AI assistant for himself.
Considering his hardline stance on making AI available to all (see his New York Times interview for more on this), it makes sense that he’d extend this technology to the billions of people who use Meta’s apps worldwide.
Privacy is a major concern when it comes to AI models, whether for business or personal use. Zuckerberg said during the call that Meta is making “strong privacy and security a fundamental part of the agents” it is building.
In the same breath, though, he pointed to Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses as the ideal product to deliver this functionality to people — the same tech item that many on social media have begun calling “pervert glasses.”
Instagram is cracking down on content captured with the glasses, but this use case raises a broader concern about how people’s information will be used by these proposed AI assistants if Zuckerberg’s big bet on superintelligence for all pays off.
More than 1 million businesses have been using Meta business agents on WhatsApp and Messenger, Zuckerberg said Wednesday. Instagram is next for this type of agentic AI, which learns over time what customers need and delivers those insights back to the business to help shape overall strategies.
This is a “business-in-a-box service” that Meta is aiming to build, which can help you start and run your whole business using the service’s platforms.
The primary goal, repeated throughout the earnings call, is to put superintelligence directly into people’s hands rather than centralize it.
“We are focused on distributing it widely and giving everyone the ability to direct it towards what matters to them,” Zuckerberg continued. “That’s the way that society has always made progress, and I think these are the right values for building a positive AI future.”
What does that future look like, exactly? According to Meta’s CEO, billions of people will have a personal agent that is locked in on their goals and works nonstop to help you acheive them.
“I get that this is sort of a big bet across the industry,” he said, in what could be viewed as a bit of an understatement.
As part of Meta’s earnings report, Reality Labs — the part of the company that develops its VR headsets and smart glasses — generated $431 million in revenue, while its operating loss widened to $4.6 billion.
Since 2020, the division has racked up total operating losses of $80 billion. In response to this loss, which comes two days after Meta’s new investment to build a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, Meta’s stock price dropped by 10% by the end of Wednesday.
“There’s a bit of similarity to Meta’s metaverse missteps in that Meta is once again spending ahead of proven product demand,” Forrester Research Director Mike Proulx told CNET. “The difference is that AI adoption and value are real. The technology is different, but the market’s patience is starting to look familiar.”
Zuckerberg seemed unfazed by the loss during the earnings call, acknowledging the reactions to Meta’s spending push on AI.
“My personal bet is that the people who invest in this are going to be rewarded and feel very good over time.”
Overall for the second quarter, Meta announced revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28%, and net income of $15.8 billion, down 14% from a year earlier. Total costs and expenses were $42 billion, an increase of 55%.
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