Meta’s Q2 financial results confirm the trend set last quarter: generative AI is already working, but it will take a long time to make money. Meta is different from most AI players in that it’s already making a lot of money. Last quarter, its revenue was $39 billion (up 22% year-over-year) and its profit was $13.5 billion (+73%); 3.27 billion people use at least one of Meta’s apps every day. At the same time, the company’s financial returns on its AI investments are expected to be “longer in the future,” CFO Susan Li said at a briefing on the occasion of the quarterly results.
“It’s hard to predict what this will look like a few generations down the road, but at this point, I’d rather take the risk of adding capacity before it’s needed than after it’s too late,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the same event.
Future AI Developments and Product Updates
He again expressed confidence that the Meta AI assistant could become the most used in the world by the end of the year — generative AI, in his opinion, will increase user engagement in the company’s products, but the money will come from business cases: from creating ads from scratch and AI agents for customer service in WhatsApp. Meta is already preparing to train a large language model, Llama 4, which will be released 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 said nothing about the intention to invest in EssilorLuxottica, but the success of the second-generation Meta Ray-Ban glasses inspired him, and the company continues to work on “future generations of glasses with AI.” The issue of the metaverse compared to AI has faded into the background, but Zuckerberg mentioned that sales of Quest 3 exceed the company’s expectations. And, according to unofficial sources, a cheaper version of the headset will be announced at the Connect event.
NIXSOLUTIONS reminds that 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. Facebook’s audience has also begun to grow, and now, contrary to stereotypes, it is provided by young people.
We’ll keep you updated on Meta’s progress in AI and its financial performance in the coming quarters.