Meta Upgrades its AI Game

Meta (Nasdaq: META), formerly Facebook, recently announced its second quarter results that outpaced market expectations. Like others, Meta is also increasing its AI arsenal to offer innovative use cases.

Meta’s Financials

Meta’s Q2 revenues grew 11% to $32 billion, ahead of the market’s estimates of $30.91 billion. Adjusted EPS also came in ahead of expectations at $2.98 against the market’s forecast of $2.87.

Advertising revenues grew 11.9% to $31.5 billion and other revenues grew 3.2% to $225 million.

Daily active user (DAU) numbers for the core Facebook app grew 5% to 2.06 billion and monthly active users (MAU) grew 3% to 3.03 billion. The number of people active on any one of its family of products, which includes WhatsApp and Instagram, grew 6% to 3.88 billion people per month in the quarter. The number of daily active users on these applications grew 7% to 3.07 billion.

For the third quarter, Meta expects revenues to be in the range of $32-$34.5 billion, significantly ahead of the $30.4 billion average analyst estimate.

Meta’s AI Growth Plans

Recently, Meta announced the development of its new generative AI tool AudioCraft. Consisting of MusicGen, AudioGen, and EnCodec, AudioCraft allows users to generate high quality music and audio from text. MusicGen was trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music and generates music from text prompts. AudioGen was trained on public sound effects and generates audio from text prompts. Meta is releasing its pretrained AudioGen models, letting users generate environmental sounds and sound effects. It also announced an improved version of its EnCodec decoder, allowing for higher quality music generation. Read our previous post for more analysis on Meta’s Generative AI plans.

It also announced the launch of Instagram Threads, which offera a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations. Meta is working to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub as well. Threads was launched to compete with the now struggling Twitter. Users can join Threads with their Instagram account, and can control who the users are able to interact with. The accessibility features on Instagram, like screen reader support and AI generated image descriptions, are also available on Threads.

Its stock is trading at $313.19 with a market capitalization of $805.9 billion. It hit a 52-week high of $326.20 in July and a 52-week low of $88.09 in October last year.

Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article. I am an investor in this company.

Photo Credit: Marco Paköeningrat/Flickr.com