One sentence from Zuckerberg was enough to make Meta’s shares collapse: what he said

Sometimes the truth it hurts, not only to those who listen to it, but also to those who say it. You saw it with your own eyes as the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, soon after admitting in a call to its investors that making money with AI (artificial intelligence) will take time. Investors did not like his words at all: the next day, at the opening of Wall Street, Meta shares dropped by 15%sending it up in smoke 190 billion dollars.

Statements from the founder of Facebook And Instagram they arrived right after a golden quarter for Metawhich saw an increase in its net profit of 12 billion dollars. However, what made shareholders turn up their noses were the estimates on expected revenues for the next quarter, especially given the expenses that the company is incurring to fully enter the AI ​​race. Just a few weeks ago, in April 2024, the company launched in the United States Meta AIits artificial intelligence assistant, on all its platforms.

What Zuckerberg said about the future of AI to Meta

During the call on Wednesday 24 April 2024, the CEO of Meta said investors’ enthusiasm cooled after the good results produced by the launch of Meta AI. But this growth – Zuckerberg warned – is inevitably destined to slow downand although the profits accrued in the first quarter are encouraging, the real gains will only be seen after some time.

Zuckerberg then compared the success of the launch of Meta AI to that of stories and reels on Instagram. “Investing in new experiences in our apps has proven to be great long term investment“, said the CEO of Meta speaking about the company’s past. However, he wanted to underline how the AI ​​sector is “a bigger undertaking” compared to things done so far, so its full success is to be expected “probably will take several years“.

The success of Meta AI is still a gamble

Also in the meeting on Wednesday 24 April, Zuckerberg said contextualized the great success which had Meta’s assistant just launched in the United States on all the company’s platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp – in free version (at least for now).

It is true that in these few days – the CEO of Meta took stock – the assistant has been tested by tens of millions of users. But this data must be put into context: first of all, the new function was given one highly visible space on the platforms (it is found for example near the Instagram search bar), furthermore for the moment it is free, so everyone can use it, even just out of curiosity, without giving anything in return.

There real challenge will get the same response from users even when Meta AI it will no longer be free and people will have to purposely seek it out to use it. There are many strategies to achieve this, Zuckerberg reassured, and the introduction of Meta AI could also improve it ad personalization.