Meta platforms reach more than 3 billion daily users for the first time
The Meta platforms together reach three billion daily users for the first time. The company announced this when announcing its quarterly figures. Meta’s turnover increased 3 percent compared to last year, but profits shrank 24 percent.
Facebook broke the 2 billion daily users mark in the past three months, let Meta know. In total, all Meta platforms together achieved a record user base of 3.02 billion, five percent more than last year.
The total turnover amounts to 25.9 billion euros, while in the first quarter of 2022 it was 25.3 billion. Profit has fallen from 6.7 billion euros to 5.2 billion. Meta’s Reality Labs division in particular posted big losses; almost $4 billion. The company expects this AR and VR department to make even more losses over the course of the year. Ad revenue, on the other hand, has grown; converted to 25.4 million euros compared to 24.4 million in the first three months of 2022.
Although Meta’s financial position is said to be ‘improving’, the company plans to start a new large-scale layoff round next month. This should ‘promote the quality and speed of our work’, explains Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a conversation with analysts, according to Engadget.
In addition, Zuckerberg emphasizes that the company will invest heavily in AI in the near future. In a conversation with investors, he said that he wants to ‘introduce AI agents to billions of people’. writes The Verge. It is not clear what Meta exactly plans to do with AI, but Zuckerberg does say that he wants to use generative AI for ‘chat experiences’ in WhatsApp and Messenger, ‘visual creation tools’ in Facebook and Instagram and for advertisements.
Generative AI should be used “for literally every one of our products,” and the first integrations should be available “in the coming months,” Zuckerberg says. As an example, he gives WhatsApp’s customer service, which must work much faster with the help of ‘tens of millions of AI agents’, although no further details are given. He further states that the company has not dropped its vision on the metaverse, but that the focus on AI and the metaverse are both important spearheads. Ultimately, Zuckerberg wants to use AI for “creating avatars, objects and worlds in the metaverse and the code to connect it all together.”