Meta has spent billions of dollars to revamp its artificial intelligence strategy in recent months, including on a new team of researchers dedicated to creating a “superintelligent” A.I.
On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors why the team would be worth its return on investment.
Superintelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg defined as an A.I. model more powerful than the human brain, will improve “nearly every aspect of what we do,” he said on a call with investors. The A.I. will help Meta’s advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer, which is already happening, he said. A.I. will also serve as a personal tool for users to create “a new era of individual empowerment,” he added.
The main way people will interact with superintelligence will be through Meta’s smart glasses, which have cameras and software that can shoot and process videos, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
“I think that if history is a guide, then an even more important role will be how superintelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other, and lead more fulfilling lives,” he said.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments came as Meta reported revenue of $47.5 billion for the second quarter, up 22 percent from a year earlier and above Wall Street estimates of $44.8 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet. Profit was $18.3 billion, up 36 percent from a year earlier and surpassing estimates of $15.1 billion.
The Silicon Valley company also indicated that its spending will continue rising. Meta raised part of its capital expenditure forecast for the year, and said the rate of increase in its spending would jump next year, driven by its construction of data centers, which are the giant computing facilities underlying its A.I. push, and hiring new A.I. researchers.
Revenue for the current quarter would be $47.5 billion to $50.5 billion, the company forecast, above Wall Street expectations of $46.2 billion. Meta’s shares rose more than 11 percent in after-hours trading.
Meta’s family of apps, which includes Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, had 3.48 billion daily users in June, up 6 percent from a year ago. Its Reality Labs division, which develops the smart glasses, lost $4.53 billion in the second quarter, slightly more than a year ago.
Mr. Zuckerberg has been on a tear in recent months to create a superintelligence lab as Meta struggled to advance its A.I. models. He has offered some nine-figure pay packages to hire top A.I. researchers. And in June, he invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI. Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s chief executive, joined Meta as its new chief A.I. officer.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Zuckerberg published a blog post with new details about the A.I. effort. He said the hypothetical technology would not replace human work, but would serve as a tool for people and businesses.
But he gave no specific timetable for when superintelligence might arrive. On the conference call, he said that the “aggressive assumptions, or the fastest assumptions, have been the ones that have most accurately predicted what would happen.”
Investors, who reacted skeptically to Meta’s focus in 2021 on the so-called world of the metaverse, have been more patient with Mr. Zuckerberg’s investment in A.I. Part of the reason is that A.I. has become the focus of the entire tech industry, said Uday Cheruvu, a portfolio manager for Harding Loevner, an investment firm.
But there is pressure for Meta’s new A.I. team to deliver results soon, especially when it comes to improving the company’s core advertising business, said Andrew Rocco, a stock analyst at Zacks.
“I think the long-term plan is for Meta to branch out beyond the ads” when it comes to A.I., Mr. Rocco said, including developing chatbots and personal assistants that mimic human interactions. But “what’s going to move Meta’s stock price is how A.I. is impacting their core business already,” he added.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
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