A look inside Meta's AI glass ball Zuckerberg enthusiastic about Meta's AI future
Facebook and Instagram remain money machines. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Group is using its advertising revenue to finance billions in investments in AI.
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- The Facebook group Meta is investing a large part of its advertising revenue directly back into the expansion of AI data centers.
- CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts that Meta AI will soon become the most widely used AI assistant.
- AI investments are increasing, supported by booming advertising revenue and 3.2 billion daily users.
The Facebook group Meta is raking in billions with its advertising business - and is investing a large part of this in the expensive expansion of data centers for AI. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg believes that the Meta AI chatbot is on its way to becoming the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year.
After presenting the latest quarterly figures, he enthused about a future in which influencers can be imitated for fans by individualized AI chatbots - and advertisers can put their campaigns on Meta platforms practically entirely in the hands of the software.
Are people practising with AI chatbots for real conversations?
Users are already using meta AI to "play through difficult conversations before having them with a human", Zuckerberg claimed. Or to search for information.
The latter example was not entirely well chosen: Just hours earlier, Meta admitted that its chatbot had declared the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump to be fiction in a conversation with some users. The company blamed this on the well-known problem of so-called "hallucinations", in which AI software simply fantasizes.
Ten times more computing power for next AI model
And AI visions cost a lot of money. Last quarter, Meta's expenditure rose by seven percent to 24.22 billion dollars. For this year, Meta is now forecasting costs of between 37 and 40 billion dollars - and is preparing investors for "significant" growth in 2025. Computing power for training AI models in particular is exorbitantly expensive.
Zuckerberg estimated that the next in-house AI model, called Llama-4, will require around ten times more computing power for training than the current version. Meta is already a major customer of the chip company Nvidia, whose systems dominate the training of AI - and cost tens of thousands of dollars per unit.
The fear of not having enough computing power
The demand for computing power is difficult to predict, Zuckerberg admitted. But he wanted to be on the safe side: "At this point, I'd rather risk building capacity before it's needed than be too late." Investors are going along with this: The shares rose by more than seven percent in after-hours US trading.
CFO Susan Li also emphasized that the AI infrastructure could be used for various purposes - from AI training to better personalization of video selection for individual users. This could help in competition with the video platform TikTok, for example.
3.2 billion users every day
And Meta has the necessary financial cushion thanks to its booming advertising business. In the last quarter, Group revenue jumped by 22% year-on-year to just over 39 billion dollars. Profit rose by 73 percent to just under 13.5 billion dollars (12.44 billion euros).
Around 3.2 billion users recently accessed at least one app from the Meta Group every day. The business with applications such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp generated an operating profit of 19.3 billion dollars in the last quarter. And Threads, Meta's still ad-free alternative to Elon Musk's online platform X, is on course to break the 200 million users per month mark.
Focus on camera glasses as eyes for AI
In addition to AI, Meta has another expensive bet on the future. The Reality Labs division, in which Meta bundled its business with virtual worlds and computer glasses, continues to eat up a lot of money. The division posted an operating loss of just under 4.9 billion dollars after a loss of 3.74 billion dollars a year ago.
Over the years, Meta has already burned through around 50 billion dollars in this area, which remains a niche business. However, Zuckerberg points to the popularity of the camera glasses developed together with Ray-Ban, which could give Meta's AI important context to the user's environment. This allows an AI assistant to see what you see yourself, he argues.
