Zuckerberg focuses Q4 earnings call on futuristic AI

You can guess it’s been a good quarter for Meta when CEO Mark Zuckerberg gets to spend much of his opening remarks pontificating about how Facebook can further the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term for a hypothetical AI that can perform a range of tasks on par with a human.

Zuckerberg did just that as Meta reported $40.1 billion in revenue and $5.33 in earnings per share to beat analyst consensus expectations and issue its first-ever cash dividend to investors.

The Facebook chief dove into Meta’s long-term vision for AI, which involves “building full general intelligence” and “playing to win” in the AI arms race.

Zuckerberg also declared a victory for the company’s so-called “year of efficiency,” in which it laid off upward of 21,000 employees as it sought to slim down some of its business operations. It was such a success that he wants to “keep things lean” for the foreseeable future.

The push helped the company become “leaner and more balanced towards our engineering work, and more streamlined, and to improve our financial performance, primarily with the goal of providing stability, so we can invest in these long-term, ambitious visions around AI and metaverse over what we see is the coming decade or more as these things play out,” Zuckerberg said. “At this point, I feel like I’ve really come around to thinking that we operate better as a leaner company.”

Generally speaking: While companies like OpenAI have made AGI a stated goal, Zuckerberg said the idea of aiming for this kind of super-intelligence became clear to him in the past year.

“Previously, I thought that because many of the tools were social, commerce, or maybe media-oriented that it might be possible to deliver these products by solving only a subset of AI’s challenges,” Zuckerberg said. “But now it’s clear that we’re going to need our models to be able to reason, plan, code, remember, and many other cognitive abilities in order to provide the best versions of the services that we envision.”

Zuckerberg said that goal will help Meta provide AI for creators to use for fan engagement, businesses for customer service and commerce, and developers for coding.

Metaverse watch: Meta’s other big bet on the future, Reality Labs, generated more than $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, thanks to what Zuckerberg said was “a strong holiday season” for Quest headset sales. But the division still lost $4.6 billion overall in the quarter.

Zuckerberg said that while Meta continues to invest in the metaverse, he tends to get more questions about AI these days. Indeed, mentions of AI on the call outpaced those of the metaverse about tenfold—upward of 70 versus seven, respectively.