Meta has indicated a strategic plan for artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on making significant investments in the long term rather than generating immediate income. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg elucidated Meta’s future vision and underscored the need for substantial computing resources to bolster its AI endeavours.
Zuckerberg said that Meta is strategically preparing for the computational clusters and data requirements anticipated in the following years, explicitly emphasising their upcoming artificial intelligence model, Llama 4.
The business expects that training Llama 4 would need almost ten times the computational power of its predecessor, Llama 3, which is estimated to have used 16,000 GPUs. Zuckerberg stated his objective for Llama 4 to become the most cutting-edge model in the business by the following year.
Meta has made a significant financial commitment to the development of AI, with the business expecting to spend between $37 and $40 billion for the whole year. This is a $2 billion increase from their earlier predictions. Investors were also advised to anticipate “substantial” rises in capital expenditures in the next year.
Although Meta has made significant expenditures, the CFO, Susan Li, said the business does not anticipate generating income from generative AI in the current year.
I highlighted the company’s focus on constructing adaptable AI infrastructure, enabling modifications in capacity depending on the most effective use cases. She clarified that the hardware used for AI model training may also be utilised for inferencing and, with adaptations, for ranking and recommendations.
Meta’s ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, known as “Core AI,” are already yielding favourable outcomes in enhancing user interaction on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg emphasised the effectiveness of a newly introduced integrated video recommendation mechanism for Facebook, which has already resulted in more significant user interaction on Facebook Reels compared to the previous transition from CPUs to GPUs.
In his forward-thinking vision, Zuckerberg foresees AI as a critical force in transforming Meta’s advertising business. He forecasted that artificial intelligence (AI) would assume control of ad text production and personalisation in the following years, enabling marketers to merely provide a business purpose and budget. At the same time, Meta’s AI takes care of the remaining tasks.
Despite Meta’s significant expenditures in AI, the firm maintains a robust financial standing. The Q2 figures indicated a revenue of $39 billion and a net income of $13.5 billion, reflecting a year-over-year growth of $7 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively. Meta’s user base is growing steadily, with over 3.2 billion individuals using a Meta application daily. Its rival, Threads, is rapidly nearing 200 million active monthly users.
Meta’s approach in the AI environment is focused on long-term goals, emphasising scientific progress and infrastructural growth rather than immediate financial gains.
