India becomes largest market for Meta's AI chatbot
India has emerged as the leading market for Meta's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, according to Susan Li, the CFO of Meta. The announcement was made during the company's Q2 earnings call. Li revealed that since its launch in June this year, billions of queries have been processed by Meta AI. The AI chatbot is available across various platforms including WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.
Meta's user engagement and revenue growth
Li also highlighted strong user engagement and retention on WhatsApp, one of the platforms where Meta AI is available. The company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, envisions a future where every business will have an AI agent for customer interaction. The total daily users across all Meta apps reached approximately 3.27 billion in June, marking a 7% YoY increase. Zuckerberg also reported that Threads, Meta's micro-blogging platform rivaling X, is approaching 200 million monthly active users.
Meta reports significant revenue growth in Q2
Meta's primary revenue source, advertising, saw a significant 21.6% increase from $31.5 billion in Q2 FY23 to $38.3 billion this year. The total revenue for all apps reached $38.7 billion, contributing to a surge in both profit and revenue for Q2 2024. These figures represent the second-highest in nine quarters. Li noted robust revenue growth across various regions and industries, especially from smaller advertisers, and anticipates this trend to continue into Q3 with total revenue projected between $38.5-41 billion.
Meta's investment in AI and infrastructure
Zuckerberg emphasized the crucial role of AI in enhancing recommendation quality and user engagement across Facebook and Instagram. The tech giant has been expanding its Llama family of AI models, including the first frontier-level open-source model, Llama 3.1 with 405 billion parameters. Meta's capital expenditure for Q2 was $8.5 billion, primarily invested in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. The firm projects full-year 2024 capital expenditure to range between $37 billion and $40 billion.
Meta's venture into metaverse and workforce details
Beyond AI, Meta is also investing heavily in the metaverse, an immersive digital realm. The company has been making significant investments in this area since its rebranding from Facebook to Meta in 2021. Reality Labs, a unit working on VR and AR gadgets for Meta's metaverse vision, reported $353 million in revenue for Q2. However, it also incurred an operating loss of $4.5 billion due to ongoing product development efforts and investments to expand its ecosystem.
