The generative AI gold rush is underway – but don’t expect it to turn a profit any time soon.
The company is already quite profitable, increasing net income to over $12 billion on revenue of $36.5 billion in the last quarter alone. However, revenue growth is expected to slow in the future. At the same time, more than ever is being spent on AI and the metaverse.
“Historically, investing in building these new, scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who have stayed with us,” Zuckerberg said on the first-quarter earnings call, drawing an analogy to the introductions of stories and roles. “Here too, the first signs are quite positive. But building leading-edge AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we have added to our apps, and will likely take several years.”
He said the meta-AI assistant has been “tried out” by “tens of millions of people” since it was made generally available last week, although this is to be expected given how prominent it has become in areas such as Instagram. Search field is represented. The real test will be whether Meta AI becomes a product that people use often, and whether many people want to use an AI assistant in social media apps.
Looking ahead, Meta sees several ways to monetize its assistant, which is currently free to use.
“There are multiple ways to build a massive business here, including scaling business messaging, introducing ads or paid content into AI interactions, and allowing people to pay to use larger AI models and access more computing power.” said Zuckerberg. “In addition, AI is already helping us improve app engagement, which naturally leads to us seeing more ads and directly improving ads to deliver more value.”
A different path than OpenAI
Over the next year or so, Zuckerberg suggested that using Meta AI could also improve the quality of its ads, meaning the company will analyze the way people use its assistant to better understand what they’re buying want. This approach puts Meta on a different path than OpenAI, which has so far resisted advertising as a business model in favor of subscriptions and an emerging enterprise focus.
“I used to think that AR glasses wouldn’t really become a mainstream product until we had fully holographic displays,” he said. “But it now seems pretty clear that there is also a meaningful market for fashionable AI glasses without a display.”