- Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Senate on Meta’s harm to children, announces highest profits ever
- Meta outlines strategy to compete against Alphabet and Microsoft in AI arms race
- Zuckerberg highlights Meta’s advantage in data collection, aiming for general intelligence and world-class AI assistant
Additional Coverage:
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Senate regarding the harm done to children by Meta. Today, he announced that the company has achieved its highest profits ever.
During Meta’s earnings call on Thursday, Zuckerberg outlined the company’s strategy to compete against Alphabet and Microsoft in the AI arms race. Meta’s advantage lies in its collection of data from its walled garden.
Zuckerberg took a dig at competitors Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI by highlighting the vast amount of publicly shared images and videos on Meta’s platform. This data set is larger than those crawled by search engines, which other companies use to train their AI models.
In addition to the generative AI technology already offered by Meta, Zuckerberg is aiming for “general intelligence.” This refers to a concept of creating a general-purpose AI that can perform better than humans in most tasks.
Zuckerberg emphasized Meta’s goal of building the most advanced AI products and services. If successful, Meta intends to provide its users with a world-class AI assistant. However, this ambitious project comes with a hefty price tag, potentially increasing Meta’s capital expenditures by $9 billion this year.
Meta hinted at the need for continuous infrastructure investments, signaling that their long-term AI research and product development efforts will require ongoing financial support beyond this year.
On Thursday, Meta announced its first-ever cash dividend for investors. This news, coupled with strong results in Meta’s advertising business, led to a 14.5% increase in the company’s stock during after-hours trading.
Zuckerberg further elaborated on his vision of artificial general intelligence, emphasizing its incorporation into Meta products like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The specifics of how Meta will use user activity as training data for its AI and address potential privacy concerns remain unclear.
It is yet to be seen whether Meta’s confidence in the value of its training data compared to Google’s vast corpus of web data is an advantage as significant as Zuckerberg believes. While Google possesses extensive data from platforms like YouTube and its search engine, Meta highlights its open-source Llama model as a key advantage.
Aside from the earnings news, Zuckerberg faced tough questioning during a U.S. Senate hearing where he apologized to families who suffered harm from social media. However, he did not agree to compensate the families, as requested by Senator Hawley.
Despite the challenges, Meta’s stock performance on Thursday led to a $1.6 billion increase in Zuckerberg’s net worth, according to Forbes.