Meta Platforms conference call update: AI will be biggest investment area in 2024 (299.53 -13.02)
- Continue focusing on operating efficiently going forward. AI will be biggest investment area in 2024, in engineering and compute resources. Going to continue deprioritizing a number of non-AI projects to shift people towards working with AI instead.
- On the recruiting front, have a sizable hiring backlog; still planning to grow headcount at a much slower rate going forward, but the actual rate next year may temporarily be faster as we work through this hiring backlog.
- Reels has now driven more than 40% increase in time spent on Instagram since launch. Reached a monetization milestone earlier-than-expected, and estimate that reels is now net neutral to overall company ad revenue.
- Generative AI will increasingly be important going forward. Believe LLaMA is now the leading open source model with more than 30 million downloads last month.
- AI-driven feed recommendations continue to grow their impact on incremental engagement, with a 7% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year.
- AI tools for advertisers also driving results with shopping campaigns reaching a $10 billion run rate and more than half of advertisers using advantage plus creative tools to optimize images in text and ads creative.
- Threads: There are just under 100 million monthly actives at this point and getting to the point to be focusing on growing the community further.
- Other major long-term focus is the metaverse; just launched Quest 3. Also launched the next generation of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Also making progress on software for the metaverse 2.