MetaThe company's shares closed down more than $310 million on Thursday, a day after it released strong third-quarter earnings but expressed caution about a possible advertising slowdown due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, warned analysts that the company’s stock price had suffered due to uncertainty in the Middle East. Despite this, the company’s third-quarter revenue was $34.15 billion, up 23% year-over-year, the fastest growth rate since 2021. Net income rose 164% to $11.58 billion, or $4.39 per share, both figures beating Wall Street expectations. However, due to the conflict in Israel, Meta’s financial forecast for the fourth quarter gave a range of $36.5 billion to $40 billion, a wider range than the $2.5 billion spread the company typically provides.
In the third quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2023,Meta CEO MarkZuckerbergEmphasizes the importance of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in future applications, he said that over time, AI will account for an increasing share of the content users consume.
He also said,By 2024, AI will become Meta maximumTo avoid adding too many new employees, the company will lower the priority of some non-AI projects and shift the relevant personnel to AI work..
Zuckerberg also mentioned:Meta has released several unique open source AI models, such as the large language model Llama 2, which is free for research and commercial use., in order to maintain its leading position in the industry and attract more outstanding AI talents to join Meta.
At the same time, Meta's CFO Susan Li also mentioned that after the 2023 fiscal year with efficiency as the theme,Meta will recruit employees in four major areas in fiscal year 2024: AI, monetization, Metaverse and Reality Labs (Reality Lab responsible for Metaverse), and regulatory compliance.At the same time as the financial report was released, Meta's metaverse-related department, Reality Labs, which is responsible for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) business, still lost $3.742 billion in the third quarter.
At the recent Meta Connect developer conference,The company has also launched a series of generative AI products for consumers, including Meta AI, a chatbot that can generate text and images, and AI Studio, a platform for developers that enables businesses and creators to build and train customized chatbots on the platform..