Be prepared for turbulence and have patience. That was Mark Zuckerberg's message to Meta shareholders on Wednesday as he explained his decision to spend tens of billions of dollars on AI spending over several years before seeing any meaningful returns. .
The co-founder and CEO of Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, said he has recently become more optimistic about his company's prospects for dominating the competitive generative AI services market, saying, , the feeling of accomplishing it.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged during the company's first-quarter earnings call that that may not be good for investors. And outside of Zuckerberg's speaking hours, Meta's stock price was down more than 15%. “We have historically experienced large fluctuations in stock prices at this stage of our product strategy, where we are investing in new products and scaling them, but have not yet achieved profitability.”
Meta said Wednesday that capital spending to advance its AI ambitions could total $40 billion this year, up to $5 billion more than it had targeted in October. And costs are only going to rise over the next few years, the company said. “This will probably take several years,” he said.
But Zuckerberg also noted that “smart investors” will recognize the opportunity in front of them and be patient. After all, the company has been through situations like this before, noting that its investments in products like Reels and Stories have since paid off.
This direct appeal to Wall Street for patience highlights the risks of the AI arms race that Meta is engaging in. Microsoft reportedly plans to spend up to $100 billion to build a specialized AI data center with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. And Google's owner Alphabet has invested heavily in AI over the years.
While Google and Microsoft both have cloud businesses that serve as a means to monetize their AI investments, Meta is not in the cloud business. But Zuckerberg hinted that charging for “computing” could be one way to generate revenue from AI technology alongside traditional advertising businesses.
Zuckerberg said his confidence in Meta's AI prospects has increased thanks to the company's recently released Llama 3 large-scale language model and a consumer version of that technology, called Meta AI in some countries. I said that there is. Zuckerberg said tens of millions of people have already tried MetaAI, and the company plans to roll it out to even more users in the coming months.
While Meta does not currently generate any direct revenue from users interacting with Meta AI, Zuckerberg has repeatedly pointed to the company's track record of monetizing its products once they reach sufficient scale, but the moment He did not say when that would happen.
“What we've shown so far is that we have the ability to build state-of-the-art models in-house, so I think it makes sense to aim for that. And we intend to do that. And I think it's a good long-term investment.”
