During its earnings call yesterday (24 April), Meta committed to increasing its AI spend in 2024 to between $35-40bn. Meta had originally anticipated that its 2024 expenditure would be in the region of $30-37bn. 

While the company did not specify how much, it also stated that it expected its expenditure to increase in the years following 2024 as it continues to build AI infrastructure.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that the company had experienced a good start to the financial year. Meta recorded a total Q1 2024 revenue of $36.4bn, which is a 27% increase from last year. 

“The new version of Meta AI with Llama 3 is another step towards building the world’s leading AI. We’re seeing healthy growth across our apps, and we continue making steady progress building the metaverse as well,” Zuckerberg said. 

In the earnings call, Zuckerberg stated that the rollout of the company’s AI assistant, Meta AI, was going well. 

“Tens of millions of people have already tried [Meta AI]. The feedback is very positive and, when I first checked in with our teams, the majority of feedback we were getting was people asking us to release Meta AI for them, wherever they are,” said Zuckerberg. 

Zuckerberg stated that Meta AI would be released in other languages in the future. 

“This leads me to believe that we should invest significantly more over the coming years to build even more advanced models and the largest scale AI services in the world,” he said. 

However, he stated that it would take time before Meta’s AI investments returned significant revenue back to the company. 

Following its earnings call, Meta’s share price did drop 15%. 

Research and analysis company GlobalData forecast that 2024 would see an increased rollout of AI products on the market. 

By 2027, it expects global generative AI revenues to be exceeding $33bn achieving a CAGR of 80% from 2022.