The second-quarter earnings of Meta continue the trend from the previous quarter: while generative artificial intelligence (AI) may have arrived, it will still take a long time to achieve profitability. For Meta, the good news is that unlike almost all other AI startups, it is already making a lot of money. In the last quarter, the company's revenue slightly exceeded $39 billion, a year-on-year growth of 22%, with a profit of approximately $13.5 billion, a year-on-year growth of 73%. Meta's apps are used by 3.27 billion people every day. This scale and financial strength enable Meta to make bold investments, and Mark Zuckerberg is known for his bold investments. During Meta's earnings call on Wednesday, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li reiterated to investors that the company's recent investments in AI will bring financial returns over a "longer period of time." Zuckerberg directly explained why Meta has invested billions of dollars in Nvidia hardware and other infrastructure, anticipating future returns: "It's hard to predict how this will develop in future generations of products, but for now, I'd rather take the risk of building capacity ahead of time than regret not being prepared later." He once again stated that Meta's AI assistant is expected to become the most widely used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year. While he mentioned that generative AI features "will increase user engagement with our products," he pointed out that real revenue will come from business use cases, such as AI creating ads from scratch and enabling businesses to operate their own AI customer service agents on WhatsApp. Other highlights from the earnings call: - Meta has already started preparing to train Llama 4, and Zuckerberg hopes that the model will be the "most advanced" in the industry when it is launched sometime next year. The computing power required for Llama 4 will be nearly 10 times that of Llama 3.1. (Huang Renxun may owe Zuckerberg a few leather jackets.) - Regarding the rumors of Meta's recent investment in eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica: Zuckerberg did not mention any investment matters, but after the latest Meta Ray-Ban glasses achieved preliminary success, he expressed excitement about building "future generations of AI glasses." Will Supreme/Meta smart glasses be coming? - Although the metaverse seems to have been replaced by artificial intelligence in Meta's recent quarters, Zuckerberg did mention that Quest 3 sales exceeded the company's expectations, but he did not specify what those expectations were. Insiders have revealed that the company will announce a cheaper version of the headset at the Connect conference in September. - The monthly active users of Threads are "approaching" 200 million, compared to 175 million at the beginning of July. - Facebook's user count among young adults has once again increased, apparently "the numbers we see in the US are very different from the public's perception of the app's users."