San Francisco Frontiers - Meta chief Zuckerberg doubles down on AI spending

The social networking colossus raised its capital expenditures for this year to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion without laying out exactly how that investment would translate into profit.

"The way to think about the investment is that we're making a bet (on) the individual things that people care about, and that people are going to be more important in the future," Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said during an earnings call, as analysts pressed him about the company's heavy spending on AI.

He gave the example of a hot trend in "agentic" AI in which digital assistants handle computer tasks independently at the behest of people.

"There are a lot of agents out there that people are building for different things, and there aren't that many that I would want to give to my mother," Zuckerberg said.

"I think getting to that quality bar is something that I care about more than hitting a specific week for launching (a new product) or something like that."

Zuckerberg spotlighted a new Muse Spark AI model built by Meta's nascent "Superintelligence Lab", saying its technology will be put to work in Meta's offerings such as smartglasses and its advertising system.

"We are trying novel things," Zuckerberg said.

The AI investment from the company that owns Instagram and Facebook is not directly tied to a revenue stream as with Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which sell their AI-powered cloud services to clients worldwide.

Meta sent tremors on Wall Street by announcing in its earnings release that expenses at the tech giant notched up to $33.4 billion as it chases "superintelligence" through major infrastructure buys, and went on a hiring spree for top AI talent.

Shares dropped more than 6 percent even though the company topped forecasts with a profit of $26.8 billion on revenue of $56.3 billion in the quarter.

- Headwinds and scrutiny -

Adding to investor unease about Meta, chief financial officer Susan Li told analysts Meta continues to monitor legal and regulatory "headwinds" in the US and Europe, including social media addiction lawsuits.

"We continue to see scrutiny on youth related issues and have additional trials scheduled for this year in the US, which may ultimately result in a material loss," Li warned.

A Los Angeles jury in March found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young woman because of an addictive design of their social media platforms, ordering the companies to pay millions of dollars in damages.

The verdict hands plaintiffs in more than a thousand similar pending cases significant leverage -- and signals to the tech industry that juries are prepared to hold social media companies accountable for the mental health toll of their design choices.

M.Powell--SFF