AI boosts Instagram and Facebook ads, driving conversions and growth, says Mark Zuckerberg
Meta’s Q2 results showed AI-powered ad tools lifted conversions on Instagram by 5% and Facebook by 3%, as the company accelerates its push toward personal superintelligence.
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Meta Platforms Inc. reported another strong quarter, with daily active users across its family of apps topping 3.4 billion, as the company deepened its push into artificial intelligence and laid out an ambitious vision for what chief executive Mark Zuckerberg called “personal superintelligence.”
Zuckerberg said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call, “We had another strong quarter with more than 3,400,000,000 people using at least one of our apps each day and strong engagement across the board. Our business continues to perform very well, which enables us to invest heavily in our AI efforts.”
Over recent months, Zuckerberg said, Meta had “begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves,” a development he described as “slow for now but undeniable.” He defined “superintelligence” as AI that “surpasses human intelligence in every way” and argued that the goal was “now in sight.”
“Meta’s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone so that people can direct it towards what they value in their own lives,” he said. “We believe that this has the potential to begin an exciting new era of individual empowerment.”
Zuckerberg said history suggested the most important impact would not just be economic or scientific advances but “how superintelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other, and lead more fulfilling lives.”
To that end, Meta has formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, combining its foundational AI research with a new team dedicated to building the next generation of models. The effort is being led by Alexander Wang, with Nat Friedman heading AI products and applied research, and Xingjia Zhao serving as chief scientist.
“I spent a lot of time building this team this quarter, and the reason that so many people are excited to join is because Meta has all of the ingredients that are required to build leading models and deliver them to billions of people,” Zuckerberg said.
Those ingredients include massive computing capacity. Meta is developing several multi-gigawatt AI clusters, including Prometheus, coming online next year and expected to be “the world’s first gigawatt plus cluster,” and Hyperion, which can scale up to five gigawatts over several years.
From a business standpoint, Zuckerberg reiterated five AI-driven growth opportunities: advertising, more engaging content, business messaging, Meta AI as a personal assistant, and AI-powered devices.
"I’ve talked before about how I believe every business will soon have a business AI just like they have an email address, social media account, and website. We’re starting to see some product market fit in a number of countries where we’re testing these agents, and we’re integrating these business AIs into ads on Facebook and Instagram as well as directly into ecommerce websites."
On advertising, he credited AI with “unlocking greater efficiency” and driving “roughly 5% more ad conversions on Instagram and 3% on Facebook.” Generative AI features are now responsible for a “meaningful percent” of ad revenue, particularly benefiting smaller advertisers.
In user experience, improved recommendation systems have boosted time spent on Facebook by 5% and Instagram by 6% this quarter. Meta is also rolling out AI video editing tools and a new Edits app.
Zuckerberg said the company was testing business AIs in multiple countries, integrating them into ads and e-commerce websites. Meta AI, the company’s consumer-facing assistant, has surpassed one billion monthly active users.
On hardware, Meta continues to invest in AI-integrated devices, from Ray-Ban Meta Glasses to a new Oakley Meta Houston model aimed at sports users. “I think that AI glasses are gonna be the main way that we integrate superintelligence into our day to day lives,” Zuckerberg said.
Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division, is also seeing “record interest in cloud gaming” with the launch of the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. Non-gaming use cases, such as media and web browsing, are growing as well. More updates will come at the Meta Connect event on September 17.
“Overall, this has been a busy quarter,” Zuckerberg concluded. “Strong business performance and real momentum in assembling both the talent and the compute that we need to build personal superintelligence for everyone. I am very grateful to our teams who are working hard to deliver all of this, and thanks to all of you for being on this journey with us.”
