Meta reported Monday its first quarter report for 2023, which showed $28.6 billion in revenue. In its statement, the company also announced that Facebook broke its record of daily active users, which stood at 2.04 billion on average for March 2023, an increase of 4% year-over-year.
Happy news for the tech behemoth, this comes after the company incurred massive losses in its Metaverse investments. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors in an earnings call yesterday that he won’t dump the company’s Metaverse plans to make a pivot into the artificial intelligence (AI) space but that he sees both of them working in tandem.
Stating that the company’s focus will be on expanding its initiatives in AI, Meta is expecting that its capital expenditure will be in the range of $30-33 billion in the second quarter of 2023. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are no longer behind in building our AI infrastructure.”
Meta’s quarterly profit decreased 24% from last year
The company also launched its very own artificial intelligence (AI) language model called Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) in February.
In an earnings call with the investors, Zuckerberg further said, “We’re exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well.
I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone, from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience. Over time, this will extend to our work on the Metaverse, too, where people will much more easily be able to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code to tie all of them together.”
This comes after the company laid off over 10,000 employees in a bid to “pursue greater efficiency and to realign our business and strategic priorities.”
Meta conducted three rounds of layoffs, across all its companies and apps, in a span of five months. The company will be spending $1 billion in severance packages and other costs, of which $523 million have been realized in the first quarter of 2023.
“We had a good quarter, and our community continues to grow,” said Zuckerberg. “Our AI work is driving good results across our apps and business. We’re also becoming more efficient so we can build better products faster and put ourselves in a stronger position to deliver our long-term vision.”
