Meta’s second quarter earnings continue the same story from the previous quarter: generative AI may be here, but it’s going to take a long time to make money. The good news for Meta is that, unlike pretty much every AI startup, it already makes a lot of money. Last quarter, the company made just over $39 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from a year ago, and about $13.5 billion in profit, up 73 percent. 3.27 billion people use at least one of Meta’s apps every day.
While he touted that generative AI features “are things that I think will increase engagement in our products,” he said the real revenue will come from business use cases, like AI creating ads from scratch and letting businesses operate their own AI agents in WhatsApp for customer service. Some other tidbits from the earnings call: * Meta is already preparing to train Llama 4, which Zuckerberg wants to be the “most advanced” model in the industry when it comes out sometime next year.