Mark Zuckerberg Is Staking All His Chips on the Future of AI, Whether He Wants It or Not

Meta is betting big on AI. But will CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s investment in technology pay off? That’s one of the big questions left after Wednesday’s earnings call, which announced Meta’s second-quarter loss of more than $4.6 billion in its Reality Labs division.

Throughout the hour-long call, Zuckerberg talked about Meta’s business across social media apps — Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp — and the overall message he kept driving home was the role of AI in the company and the people who use Meta’s products every day.

At the center of all this is MuseSpark, an AI model developed by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. With it, Zuckerberg said Meta is hard at work creating various AI agents to streamline workflows for small businesses and improve the lives of individual Meta users.

“Soon we’ll have agents who can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your health, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want,” Zuckerberg said.

If you’ve been paying attention to all the Zuckerberg news worth printing, you might know that the CEO of Meta has built an AI assistant for himself.

Considering his strong stance on making AI available to all (see his New York Times interview for more on this), it makes sense that he would extend this technology to the billions of people who use Meta apps around the world.

Privacy is a major concern when it comes to AI models, whether for work or personal use. Zuckerberg said during the call that Meta is making “robust privacy and security an integral part of the agents” it’s building.

In the same vein, however, he pointed to Ray-Bans’ Meta smart glasses as the perfect product to bring this functionality to the masses — something many techies on social media have begun calling “reverse glasses.”

Instagram is limiting the content taken with glasses, but this use case raises wider concerns about how people’s knowledge will be used by these proposed AI assistants if Zuckerberg’s big bet on superintelligence at all succeeds.

More than a million businesses were using Meta business agents on WhatsApp and Messenger, Zuckerberg said Wednesday. Instagram is following this type of agent AI, which learns over time what customers need and feeds that information back to the business to help shape the perfect strategy.

This is the “business-in-a-box service” that Meta aims to build, which can help you start and run your entire business using service platforms.

The main goal, repeated throughout the revenue call, is to put powerful intelligence in people’s hands rather than centralizing it.

“We’re focused on spreading the word and empowering everyone to direct it to what’s important to them,” continued Zuckerberg. “That’s how society always makes progress, and I think these are the right values ​​to build a good AI future.”

What does that future look like, exactly? According to Meta’s CEO, billions of people will have a personal agent locked into their goals and working non-stop to help you achieve them.

“I find that this is kind of the biggest bet in the whole industry,” he said, in what could be considered an understatement.

As part of Meta’s earnings report, Reality Labs — the part of the company that develops its VR headsets and smart glasses — made $431 million in revenue, while its operating loss widened to $4.6 billion.

As of 2020, the division has accumulated a net operating loss of $80 billion. In response to this loss, which comes two days after Meta’s new investment to build a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, Meta’s stock price fell by 10% at the end of Wednesday.

“There is a slight and negative similarity to Meta in that Meta is repurposing before the need for a proven product,” Forrester Research Director Mike Proulx told CNET. “The difference is that AI adoption and value are real. The technology is different, but the market’s patience is starting to look normal.”

Zuckerberg appeared unfazed by the loss during the earnings call, agreeing to react to Meta’s investment in AI.

“My point is that people who invest in this will be rewarded and feel very happy in the long run.”

Overall in the second quarter, Meta announced revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28%, and revenue of $15.8 billion, down 14% from a year ago. Total costs and expenses were $42 billion, up 55%.