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The good news for Meta is that, unlike pretty much every AI startup, it already makes a lot of money. Last quarter, the company made just over $39 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from a year ago, and about $13.5 billion in profit, up 73 percent. 3.27 billion people use at least one of Meta\u2019s apps every day. That kind of scale and money buys the ability to make big bets, which Zuckerberg is famous for doing<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On Meta\u2019s Wednesday earnings call, CFO Susan Li reiterated to investors that financial returns from its recent AI investments will \u201ccome in over a longer period of time.\u201d Zuckerberg was direct about why Meta is spending billions on Nvidia hardware and the other infrastructure ahead of these future returns: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to predict how this will trend multiple generations into the future, but at this point, I\u2019d rather risk building capacity before it is needed rather than too late.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He again telegraphed that the Meta AI assistant is on track to be the most used in the world before the end of the year. While he touted that generative AI features \u201care things that I think will increase engagement in our products,\u201d he said the real revenue will come from business use cases, like AI creating ads from scratch and letting businesses operate their own AI agents in WhatsApp for customer service.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n