Facebook Group: Zuckerberg raves about AI future at Meta

After presenting the latest quarterly figures, he raved about a future in which influencers can have themselves imitated by individualized AI chatbots for fans – and advertisers can put their campaigns on meta platforms almost entirely in the hands of the software.

Are people practicing for real conversations with AI chatbots?

Users are already using Meta AI, among other things, to “play through difficult conversations before having them with a human,” Zuckerberg claimed. Or to search for information.

The latter example was not entirely fortunate: just hours earlier, Meta admitted that its chatbot had declared the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump to be fiction in 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

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And the AI ​​visions cost a lot of money. Meta’s expenses rose by seven percent to $24.22 billion last quarter. Meta now expects costs of between $37 and $40 billion this year – and is preparing investors for the fact that it will grow “significantly” in 2025. Computing power for training AI models is particularly expensive.

Zuckerberg estimated that the next in-house AI model, called Llama-4, would require around ten times more computing power to train than the current version. Meta is already a major customer of the chip company Nvidia, whose systems dominate the training of AI – and cost several tens of thousands of dollars per unit.

The fear of not having enough computing power

The need for computing power is difficult to predict, Zuckerberg admitted. But he wanted to be on the safe side: “At this point, I would rather risk building capacity before it is needed than being too late.” Investors are going along with this: The stock rose by more than seven percent in after-hours trading in the US.

Chief Financial Officer Susan Li also emphasized that the AI ​​infrastructure could be used for various purposes – from training artificial intelligence to better personalizing video selection for individual users. This could, for example, help in competition with the video platform Tiktok.

3.2 billion users daily

And Meta has the necessary financial cushion thanks to its booming advertising business. In the last quarter, group sales jumped by 22 percent year-on-year to just over 39 billion dollars. Profits 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 of the Meta Group’s apps every day. The business with applications such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp generated an operating profit of 19.3 billion dollars last quarter. And Threads, Meta’s still ad-free alternative to Elon Musk’s online platform X, is on track to break the 200 million user mark per month.

Focus on camera glasses as eyes for AI

In addition to AI, however, 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 swallow up a lot of money. The division posted an operating loss of almost 4.9 billion dollars, after a loss of 3.74 billion dollars a year ago.

Over the years, Meta has burned through around $50 billion in what remained a niche business. Zuckerberg, however, points to the popularity of the camera glasses developed jointly with Ray-Ban, which can give Meta’s AI important context about users’ surroundings. This means that an AI assistant can see what you see, he argues.

dpa

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