Zuckerberg Details AI Vision in Meta’s Q2 Earnings Call

A funny thing happened on the way to Meta’s Q2 earnings call. As it has for many tech companies during this earnings season, discussion of actual financial results took a back seat to discussions about spending on artificial intelligence (AI). With this in mind, Meta and Zuckerberg did not disappoint.

Yes, there were financial results to be had. And they were stellar. Despite concern that digital and social media advertising might have fallen on hard times during the quarter, Meta reported earnings per share (EPS) of $5.16 on revenue of $39.07 billion. Meta recorded EPS of $2.98 on revenue of $31.9 billion during the same period last year.

The company’s Family of Apps revenue, which includes revenue from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, came in at $38.72 billion, higher than estimates of $37.7 billion and much higher than the revenue of $31.7 billion in Q2 2023.

While those results led off the call, Zuckerberg wasted no time detailing his vision for how AI will play in the Meta ecosystem and, perhaps more importantly, how it will make money in that ecosystem. He separated his comments into three areas: How AI will play in existing products, how it will succeed as an open-source system, and how it will help Meta continue to develop the metaverse.

First, Zuckerberg highlighted AI’s role in enhancing content recommendations and advertising capabilities. He described a vision for a “single unified recommendation system” powering all content across Meta’s services. On the advertising front, Zuckerberg predicted that AI would eventually generate personalized ad creative, allowing advertisers to simply specify business objectives and budgets, with Meta’s AI handling the rest.

“Advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we’re going to go do the rest for them,” he said. “We’re going to get there incrementally over time, but I think this is going to be a very big deal.”

Zuckerberg also underscored the importance of Meta’s open-source AI model, Llama 3.1, positioning it as an “inflection point” for the industry. He argued that open-source AI will become the industry standard, similar to Linux in operating systems. The CEO emphasized the benefits of open-source AI for developers, Meta itself, and society at large, citing improved safety, faster innovation, and shared prosperity.

Zuckerberg also revealed plans for Llama 4, aiming to be “the most advanced in the industry next year,” with compute requirements nearly 10 times that of Llama 3.

Finally, Zuckerberg discussed how AI is shaping Meta’s metaverse ambitions. He noted that AI advancements have accelerated timelines for some products, particularly highlighting the success of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the Quest 3 VR headset. Zuckerberg sees AI as integral to the future of these devices, with plans to incorporate more AI capabilities into future generations of smart glasses and VR headsets. He teased further announcements related to AI and metaverse developments at Meta’s upcoming Connect conference on Sept. 25.

And how much will all that cost? Zuckerberg left that issue for CFO Susan Li.

“While we do not intend to provide any quantitative guidance for 2025 until the fourth quarter call, we expect infrastructure costs will be a significant driver of expense growth next year as we recognize depreciation and operating costs associated with our expanded infrastructure footprint,” Li said.