Image: © Sai/Stock.adobe.com
The tech giant plans to spend big on AI because it sees ‘strong momentum’ in this area.
Meta’s third-quarter revenue was up 19pc to $40.59bn, the highest in recent years, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed to the company’s AI progress across its apps and business. In the latest earnings call yesterday (30 October), the tech giant revealed a significant net income increase of 35pc to $15.68bn, raising the diluted earnings per share to $6.03.
CFO Susan Li expects Meta’s fourth quarter revenue to be up by a further $5bn taking it to the $45-48bn range.
Zuckerberg said that parts of the company’s “long-term vision around AI and the future of computer” were coming into “sharper focus” and added that Meta AI now has 500m monthly active users. Improvements to Meta’s AI-driven feed and video recommendations have led to an 8pc increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6pc increase on Instagram this year, he said, and more than 1m advertisers used Meta’s generative AI tools to create more than 15m ads just in the last month.
Meta’s large language models are advancing fast, with Llama 4, its newest LLM model being “well into its development”, according to Zuckerberg. He expects the smaller Llama 4 models will be released first early next year, which he said will be “a big deal”, pointing to new capabilities and speed.
‘AI presents opportunities’
Significantly, Zuckerberg said that AI advances will accelerate the company’s core business and therefore more investment in AI is warranted. “Our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there,” he said.
The company didn’t give an exact budget for AI future spend on the call but Li said she expects to see significant “scaling up” of its infrastructure capacity.
Meta shares were down 4pc despite topping profit and revenue expectations, with Reuters reporting that investors were likely spooked by large AI spending plans.
And the increased focus on AI comes with regulatory challenges also.
Meta released compact versions of its Llama 3.2 AI models last week, which it said, used significantly less space than the original 3.2 versions released last month. However, the larger multimodal models of Llama 3.2, 11B and 90B, which can process multiple formats, such as text, images, audio and video, are not available in the EU. In the summer, Meta said that it will not release these models in the EU because of the bloc’s “unpredictable” regulatory environment.
The month before this announcement, the company rolled back on plans to train its large language models using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram, following intensive discussion with the Irish Data Protection Commission.
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