Building for tomorrow, not immediate profits
Meta has signalled a long-term AI strategy that prioritises substantial investments over immediate revenue generation. During the company’s Q2 earnings call, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined Meta’s vision for the future and emphasised the need for extensive computational resources to support their AI initiatives.
Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is “planning for the compute clusters and data we’ll need for the next several years,” with a particular focus on their next AI model, Llama 4.
The company anticipates that training Llama 4 will require “almost 10x more” computing power than its predecessor, Llama 3, which is believed to have used 16,000 GPUs. Zuckerberg expressed his goal for Llama 4 “to be the most advanced [model] in the industry next year.”
Meta’s financial commitment to AI development is substantial, with the company projecting capital expenditures between $37 and $40 billion for the full year, an increase of $2 billion from previous estimates. Investors were cautioned to expect “significant” increases in capital expenditures next year as well.
Despite these massive investments, Meta CFO Susan Li acknowledged that the company does not expect to generate revenue from generative AI this year.
Li emphasised the company’s strategy of building AI infrastructure with flexibility in mind, allowing for capacity adjustments based on optimal use cases. She explained that the hardware used for AI model training can also be utilised for inferencing and, with modifications, for ranking and recommendations.
Meta’s current AI efforts, dubbed “Core AI,” are already showing positive results in improving user engagement on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg highlighted the success of a recently implemented unified video recommendation tool for Facebook, which has “already increased engagement on Facebook Reels more than our initial move from CPUs to GPUs did.”
Looking ahead, Zuckerberg envisions AI playing a crucial role in revolutionising Meta’s advertising business. He predicted that in the coming years, AI would take over ad copy creation and personalisation, potentially allowing advertisers to simply provide a business objective and budget, with Meta’s AI handling the rest.
While Meta’s AI investments are substantial, the company remains in a strong financial position. Q2 results showed revenue of $39 billion and net income of $13.5 billion, representing year-over-year increases of $7 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively. Meta’s user base continues to grow, with over 3.2 billion people using a Meta app daily, and its X competitor Threads is now approaching 200 million active monthly users.
As Meta charts its course in the AI landscape, the company’s strategy reflects a long-term vision that prioritises technological advancement and infrastructure development over immediate financial returns.
(Photo by Joshua Earle)
See also: NVIDIA and Meta CEOs: Every business will ‘have an AI’
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