Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells investors to stay patient: ‘More ambitious on AI’

Mark Zuckerberg asked investors to stay patient after Meta revealed that it will spend billions of dollars more than expected this year owing to investments in artificial intelligence. Meta CEO said that the company’s futuristic technological bets will eventually pay off.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as the letters AI for artificial intelligence appear on screen.(Reuters)

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“Smart investors see that the product is scaling and that there is a clear monetizable opportunity there even before the revenue materializes,” he said during a conference call following Meta’s first-quarter earnings report. He also warned that the investments would increase “meaningfully” and take a long time to generate returns for the company.

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What Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta's plans for AI?

He said, “We’ve gotten more optimistic and ambitious on AI. We’re at a place where we’ve shown that we can build leading models and be the leading AI company in the world. And that opens up a lot of additional opportunities beyond just ones that are the most obvious ones for us.”

Meanwhile, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said in a statement, “We expect capital expenditures will continue to increase next year as we invest aggressively to support our ambitious AI research and product development efforts."

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Meta's AI plans

In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a priority, as he has been refocussing Meta on the technology after OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. The company announced plans for a new $800 million data center in January and is also developing its own chips for artificial intelligence services. Meta is also working on several new iterations of its large language model, known as Llama.

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