Mark Zuckerberg claims Meta is years away from making money through gen AI

The race for generative AI is in full swing, but don’t count on it raking in profits anytime soon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered that message to investors during Wednesday’s call for the company’s first-quarter earnings report. After recently introducing its ChatGPT competitor across various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, much of the call centered around how exactly generative AI will start bringing in profits for Meta.

The company is already making a tidy profit, with net income soaring to over $12 billion on $36.5 billion in revenue in just the last quarter. However, its revenue growth is projected to taper off in the future. Meanwhile, it’s shelling out more cash than ever on AI and the metaverse.

“Historically, investing to build these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who have stuck with us,” Zuckerberg said on the first quarter earnings call. “And the initial signs are quite positive here, too. But building the leading AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we’ve added to our apps, and this is likely going to take several years.”

He mentioned that the Meta AI assistant has been “tested” by “tens of millions of people” since its recent widespread availability, but that’s not surprising considering how prominently it’s featured now, especially in places like the Instagram search box. The real challenge will be if the Meta AI becomes a go-to product that people use regularly, and if there’s a strong desire for an AI assistant in social media apps among many users.

“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.”

Besides the generative AI projects, Zuckerberg was pretty upbeat about Meta’s smart glasses with Ray-Ban. During the call, he mentioned that they’ve sold out in “many styles and colors” and highlighted the device’s multimodal AI, which has recently become more widely accessible.

“I used to think that AR glasses wouldn’t really be a mainstream product until we had full holographic displays,” he said. “But now it seems pretty clear that there’s also a meaningful market for fashionable AI glasses without a display.”