Zuckerberg demonstrates all his realism as he addresses investors at the meeting on the first quarterly results of the year. Artificial intelligence is a gold mine, but don’t expect gains in the short term. The summary of his speech is this. And, although the year started well, his words were alarming. So much so that the stock fell by 15 percent at the opening on Wall Street. Translated: 190 billion dollars wasted.
Investments in artificial intelligence
Zuckeberg just put its generative AI models — it’s called Meta AI — into all of its platforms. On WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and even on Ray-Ban Meta it will now be possible to request the creation of texts and images completely free of charge (but for now only in the United States). The first important move to take stock and enter the sector currently dominated by Open AI. The CEO stated that the intelligent assistant has already been “tried” by “tens of millions of people” within a week. We can only wait to understand if it’s just curiosity for a new tool or it’s something that will become part of users’ digital diet. In any case, the investments were important. Indeed, enormous. A necessary step for Zuckerberg, and which however does not lead to immediate revenues: «Historically, investing to build these new experiences at scale in our apps has been an excellent long-term investment for us and for the investors who have followed us – he said – And even in this case the first signs are quite positive. But building leading-edge AI will be a bigger undertaking than the other experiences we’ve added to our apps, and will likely take several years.”
Excellent present, uncertain future
The group’s quarterly was actually quite positive. Net income increased by more than $12 billion and revenues also increased by 27.6 percent. Even exceeding analysts’ expectations. We are talking about the third consecutive quarter of growth above 20 percent, where advertising dominates and represents 97 percent of turnover. The problem is not the present but the future: from this moment on, we expect a decline in revenues and a parallel increase in expenses to invest in artificial intelligence and the metaverse. A project that hasn’t taken off, but which hasn’t yet been abandoned.
Making money with AI
In any case, Zuckerberg already has a plan, albeit a long-term one. And he already has several ways in mind to profit from artificial intelligence: «There are several ways to build a massive business, including scaling business messaging, introducing ads or paid content into interactions with AI and the ability to pay to use larger AI models and access more calculations.” Not to mention the exploitation of these models to optimize what remains the real gold mine today: targeted advertising.
