The gold rush of generative AI is underway - just don't expect it to bring profits quickly.
This was the message conveyed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to investors during the company's Q1 earnings call on Wednesday. Meta has applied its competitor ChatGPT to multiple platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and much of the call focused on how generative AI can generate profits for Meta.
The company is currently in a good financial position, with net income exceeding $12 billion and operating revenue reaching $36.5 billion in the last quarter alone. However, its revenue growth is expected to slow down. At the same time, its investments in AI and the metaverse have surpassed previous levels.
"Historically, investing in building these new scalable experiences in our apps has been a really good long-term investment for us and for the investors who have supported us," Zuckerberg said during the Q1 earnings call, comparing it to the launch of Stories and Reels. "And the early signs are quite positive. But building leading AI will take more effort than adding other experiences to our apps, and that may take a few years."
He stated that since the launch of Meta AI Assistant last week, "tens of millions of people" have tried it, which is expected given its prominent placement in areas like the Instagram search box. The real test will be whether Meta AI becomes a product that people use frequently and whether there is a strong demand for AI assistants in social media apps.
Looking ahead, Meta sees multiple ways to monetize its assistant, which is currently free to use.
"There are many ways to build a large business here, including expanding commercial information, introducing ads or paid content in AI interactions, and charging people to use larger AI models and access more computing power," Zuckerberg said. "In addition, AI has been helping us increase engagement in our apps, which naturally leads to seeing more ads and directly improving ads to provide more value."
A different path from OpenAI
In the next year or so, Zuckerberg hinted that the use of Meta AI could improve the quality of ads, meaning the company will analyze how people use its assistant to better understand their purchasing interests. This move sets Meta on a different path from OpenAI, which has so far resisted using ads as a business model.
In addition to all the work Meta is doing in the field of generative AI, Zuckerberg is optimistic about the smart glasses the company has launched in collaboration with Ray-Ban. He said during the earnings call that these glasses have sold out in "multiple styles and colors" and highlighted the recent broader rollout of the device's multimodal AI.
"I used to think that AR glasses wouldn't truly become mainstream products until we had holographic displays," he said. "But now it's clear that even without displays, fashionable AI glasses have a meaningful market."
