Meta, revenue +22%, profit +73%. The goal: king in AI assistants by the end of the year

Meta ended the second quarter of 2024 with revenues up 22% to $39.07 billion and net profit jumped 73% to $13.46 billion. "We had a solid quarter," said CEO Marck Zuckerberg commenting on a performance that beat predictions. But there's more: Zuckerberg raised investments and bets on artificial intelligence and promised that Meta AI has remarkable goals within reach: "It's on track to become the most widely used artiificial iintellgence assistant in the world by the end of the year.

The balance of the April-June period was driven by digital advertising, which accounts for 98 per cent of revenue and is now enhanced by artificial intelligence tools that improve targeting. This has compensated for past revenue losses in ad revenue related to privacy restrictions, especially from Apple (estimated at 10 billion in 2022). In the current quarter, Meta also predicted continued solid results, with revenues of between 38.5 billion and 41 billion, above analysts' average estimates of 38.3 billion.

It was, however, the all-round commitment to AI that rose to prominence and was rewarded on Wall Street, despite cost hikes that caused rivals such as Microsoft and Alphabet to put downward pressure on stocks. Meta's shares, perhaps reflecting optimism about its ability to monetise the new innovation race better than others, gained 7% in the after-market. They are up 37% since January and about 50% in a year.

The company, when it comes to AI, is fresh off the launch of its latest large language model, Llama 3.1, last week. And it has made Meta AI available in more markets and more languages, It has indicated that the forthcoming Llama 4 will require at least ten times the computing resources required to train its predecessor, in a sign of the exponential growth at play in machine learning and AI. Against this backdrop, Zuckerbeg said he would rather "take a risk in building technological capability sooner rather than too late, given the time it takes.

Meta's capital expenditure, in more detail, rose by 33.4% to EUR 8.47bn in the quarter. The company also raised the minimum investment threshold for the whole of 2024 to 37 billion from 35 billion, while the annual cap remained at 40 billion. In recent months, at the time of the first-quarter accounts, top management had anticipated increases this year of up to ten billion in costs dedicated to the development of the infrastructure necessary for AI.