The generative AI gold rush is underway — simply don’t count on it to create earnings anytime quickly.

The corporate is already fairly worthwhile, having grown internet revenue to greater than $12 billion on $36.5 billion in income within the final quarter alone. However its income development is predicted to sluggish going ahead. On the identical time, it’s spending greater than ever on AI and the metaverse.

“Traditionally, investing to construct these new scaled experiences in our apps has been an excellent long-term funding for us and for traders who’ve caught with us,” Zuckerberg mentioned on the primary quarter earnings name, drawing an analogy to the rollouts of Tales and Reels. “And the preliminary indicators are fairly constructive right here, too. However constructing the main AI may also be a bigger enterprise than the opposite experiences we’ve added to our apps, and that is probably going to take a number of years.”

He mentioned that the Meta AI assistant has been “tried” by “tens of tens of millions of individuals” because it was made broadly obtainable final week, although that’s to be anticipated given how prominently it’s now featured in areas just like the Instagram search field. The actual take a look at will likely be whether or not Meta AI turns into a product that folks come again to usually and if numerous individuals need to use an AI assistant in social media apps.

Wanting forward, Meta sees a number of methods to monetize its assistant, which is free to make use of proper now.

“There are a number of methods to construct an enormous enterprise right here, together with scaling enterprise messaging, introducing adverts or paid content material into AI interactions, and enabling individuals to pay to make use of larger AI fashions and entry extra compute,” Zuckerberg mentioned. “And on prime of these, AI is already serving to us enhance app engagement, which naturally results in seeing extra adverts and bettering adverts on to ship extra worth.”

Within the subsequent 12 months or so, Zuckerberg recommended that utilization of Meta AI may additionally enhance the standard of its adverts, which means that the corporate will analyze the way in which individuals use its assistant to higher perceive what they’re inquisitive about shopping for. This strategy places Meta on a special path than OpenAI, which has, up to now, resisted promoting as a enterprise mannequin in favor of subscriptions and a nascent enterprise focus.

“I used to suppose that AR glasses wouldn’t actually be a mainstream product till we had full holographic shows,” he mentioned. “However now it appears fairly clear that there’s additionally a significant marketplace for modern AI glasses and not using a show.”