Shares fell when Wall Street opened yesterday morning, wiping about US$190 billion off of the value of the company.
On a conference call earlier this week, Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive said that spending on AI would have to grow “meaningfully” before the company could make much revenue from new AI products.
Meta has grown its income to more than $12 billion on $36.5 billion in revenue in the last quarter, but while growth is expected to slow down, the company remains committed to spending more on AI and the metaverse.
This comes amid a fast-moving AI race with the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google – all of whom are rolling out AI services at a rapid rate.
Meta has focused on introducing chatbots to its social media apps in a bid to boost engagement, and this month released a new version of the AI model behind those chatbots – Llama 3.
According to Zuckerberg, the Meta AI assistant has been tried by “tens of millions of people” since it was made widely available to the public. And there are ways to monetise its use, despite it currently being free to use.
“There are several ways to build a massive business here, including scaling business messaging, introducing ads or paid content into AI interactions, and enabling people to pay to use bigger AI models and access more compute,” Zuckerberg said.
“And on top of those, AI is already helping us improve app engagement, which naturally leads to seeing more ads and improving ads directly to deliver more value.”
