On Thursday, during Meta Platforms Inc.'s META fourth-quarter 2023 earnings call conference call, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about a major goal for the company saying, "We'll be building the most popular and most advanced AI products and services."
What Happened: While speaking about Meta's major objective — to develop the most popular and advanced AI products and services, Zuckerberg said, "And if we succeed, everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done, every creator will have an AI that their community can engage with, every business will have an AI that their customers can interact with to buy goods and get support, and every developer will have a state-of-the-art open-source model to build with."
He went on to highlight the need for a new category of computing devices, such as smart glasses, enabling seamless interaction with AIs that perceive and understand the user’s surroundings.
The Meta CEO also acknowledged the evolution of services requiring full general intelligence.
"Previously, I thought that because many of the tools were social-, commerce- or maybe media-oriented that it might be possible to deliver these products by solving only a subset of AI’s challenges," he stated.
Meta’s focus on general intelligence research and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research or FAIR has been ongoing for over a decade. The commitment to general intelligence will now become a central theme in their product development.
"Meta has a long history of building new technologies into our services, and we have a clear long-term playbook for becoming leaders," Zuckerberg said.
He then discussed the importance of world-class compute infrastructure, revealing the expansion of their GPU clusters to support evolving AI services. Learning from past experiences, Zuckerberg spoke about the necessity of building sufficient capacity for future AI services, anticipating increased compute intensity in training and operating models.
"We’re well positioned now because of the lessons that we learned from Reels. We initially underbuilt our GPU clusters for Reels. And when we were going through that, I decided that we should build enough capacity to support both Reels and another Reels-sized AI service that we expected to emerge so we wouldn’t be in that situation again," he said.
Adding, "At the time, the decision was somewhat controversial, and we faced a lot of questions about CapEx spending, but I’m really glad that we did this."
Why It's Important: In the fourth quarter, Meta reported a revenue of $40.11 billion, marking a 25% increase compared to the previous year. This revenue surpassed the Street consensus estimate of $39.17 billion, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
The tech giant expects first quarter revenue to be between $34.5 billion to $37.0 billion.
“We expect our ambitious long-term AI research and product development efforts will require growing infrastructure investments beyond this year,” Meta said.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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