Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes open-source language models like Llama are the future of AI. The company is investing heavily in computing power for its next-generation model and expects AI chatbots to become ubiquitous on websites soon.
"I think we'll look back on Llama 3.1 as a turning point in the industry, where open-source AI started to become the industry standard, like Linux," Zuckerberg said during the latest earnings call.
Meta wants to maximize adoption of the model. The company is partnering with cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Nvidia and Databricks are also supporting Llama 3.1. "We want developers to be able to get it everywhere," Zuckerberg said.
The company is already working on Llama 4, which Zuckerberg says will be the most advanced in the industry. He expects it to require nearly ten times the computing power used to train Llama 3.
Llama 4 will be multimodal and is set for release in 2025. As of now, it won't be available in the EU.
Meta invests heavily in AI infrastructure
Meta is planning compute clusters and data centers for the coming years to support future generations of AI models. "It's hard to predict how this will evolve over multiple generations into the future, but at this point I'd rather risk building the capacity before it's needed rather than too late, given the long lead times for new infrastructure projects," Zuckerberg said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently echoed this sentiment, stating that the risk of underinvesting in AI is much greater than overinvesting. Microsoft claimed that there's more demand for AI than its Azure infrastructure can currently provide, and is also spending billions of dollars to expand its capabilities.
Meta CFO Susan Li confirmed that Meta expects a significant increase in capital expenditure by 2025 to support AI research and product development. The AI infrastructure will be flexible to accommodate both training and inference.
In Q2, Meta spent $8.5 billion on infrastructure, up 33.4% year-over-year. Annual spending is now projected to reach $37-40 billion, up from $35-40 billion previously.
Zuckerberg predicts AI agents on every website
Zuckerberg believes AI agents will soon become standard for online businesses. "Over time, I think that just like every business has a website, a social media presence, and an email address, in the future I think that every business is also going to have an AI agent that their customers can interact with."
Meta's goal is to enable every small business, and eventually every enterprise, to easily integrate their content and catalogs into an AI agent. "When this is working at scale, I think that this is going to dramatically accelerate our business messaging revenue," Zuckerberg said.
Despite investor criticism about high AI and Metaverse spending, Zuckerberg is sticking to his strategy. Meta's numbers back him up: In Q2, revenue grew 22% to $39.1 billion, while profit increased 73% to $13.5 billion. For Q3, Meta expects revenue between $38.5-41 billion.
The company's own AI assistant, Meta AI, also seems to be catching on: Zuckerberg says it's on track to become the most used AI assistant by year-end. However, Meta also recently experienced the pitfalls of these systems, when Meta AI denied the Trump assassination due to outdated training data.
