Meta has hinted at plans for a subscription component — similar to the ones offered by rivals like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft — for those who want a more "premium" version of its AI-driven assistant, during the Q1 earnings call.
The social network and communications company has beaten Wall Street expectations as it increases its push to lead in artificial intelligence, despite the uncertainty arising from the US-China trade war.
The company reported $42.3 billion in first-quarter sales, beating expectations for $41.4 billion, while net income jumped 35 per cent to $16.64 billion, up from $12.37 billion a year earlier.
"Our business is… performing very well, and I think we're well positioned to navigate the macroeconomic uncertainty," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts.
Since Meta depends on its advertising business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, the company is continuing its expensive expansion in artificial intelligence, which helps improve ad targeting and personalisation of the content people see on social networks.
"I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality or intelligence," said Zuckerberg.
Meta now expects to spend up to $72 billion, up from its prior outlook of up to $65 billion, on AI and hardware.
"The higher cost we expect to incur for infrastructure hardware this year really comes from, you know, suppliers who source from countries around the world. And there's just a lot of uncertainty around this given the ongoing trade discussions," said Susan Lee, CFO, Meta.
The earnings call came hours after the company launched a standalone Meta AI app last week to compete with ChatGPT. But Meta has not offered details about the number of interactions with its AI chatbot or how deep those interactions need to be to consider a person a "user" of the chatbot.