Meta’s Zuckerberg looks ahead to AI-generated adverts

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has reported second-quarter revenue of $39.1bn, a 22% increase on its first quarter.

The company reported that the cost of revenue had increased by 23%, driven primarily by higher infrastructure costs and costs associated with inventory in its augmented headsets division, Reality Labs.

In his prepared remarks, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) was evolving Meta’s products. “It used to be that advertisers came to us with a specific audience they wanted to reach, like a certain age group, geography, or interests. Eventually, we got to the point where our ads system could better predict who would be interested than the advertisers could themselves,” he said.

While advertising agencies have traditionally created adverts, looking ahead, he said: “Advertisers will just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we’re going to go do the rest for them. We’re going to get there incrementally over time, but I think this is going to be a very big deal.”

Discussing the importance of open source at Meta, Zuckerberg said: “We’re in the business of building the best consumer and advertiser experiences. To do that, we need to have access to the leading technology infrastructure and not get constrained by what competitors will let us do. But these models are ecosystems, they’re not just isolated pieces of software that we can develop by ourselves.

“So if we want the most robust ecosystem of tools, efficiency improvements, silicon optimisations, and other integrations to develop around our models, then we need them to be widely used by developers across the industry. Once we know we’re going to have access to the leading models, then I am confident that we’re going to be able to build the best social and advertising experiences.”

Zuckerberg said open source tools such as PyTorch and React had received significant industry contributions, which has benefited Meta. “This approach has consistently worked for us, and I expect it will work here too,” he added.

Looking beyond Meta’s recent introduction of the Llama 3 large language model (LLM), he said: “The amount of compute needed to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times more than what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that. It’s hard to predict how [much capacity we’ll need], but I’d rather risk building capacity before it is needed, rather than being too late, given the long lead times for spinning up new infrastructure projects.”

When asked about the payback time for investments in AI, Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, said: “On our core AI work, we continue to take a very return on investment-based approach. We’re still seeing strong returns as improvements to both engagement and ad performance have translated into revenue gains, and it makes sense for us to continue investing here.”

Looking at generative AI (GenAI), she added: “We don’t expect our GenAI products to be a meaningful driver of revenue in 2024, but we do expect that they’re going to open up new revenue opportunities over time that will enable us to generate a solid return off of our investment while we’re also open sourcing subsequent generations of Llama.”

Commenting on Meta’s results, Forrester vice-president and research director Mike Proulx said: “As expected, Meta had a strong quarter despite Reality Labs facing its second-highest operating loss in two years. It would seem prudent at this point for Meta to pivot its metaverse ambitions to a much more narrow focus and cut bait on products like Horizon.”