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Meta's profit has increased almost 2x since 2023. Meta makes money from advertisers spending money on Meta. So the profit growth from Meta does very much come f

Meta's profit has increased almost 2x since 2023. Meta makes money from advertisers spending money on Meta. So the profit growth from Meta does very much come from the real economy

blitzar 1y ago
Right around the time Meta stopped setting 100's of billions a year of cash on fire in the metaverse and pivoted to Ai.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  To open-sourcing AI models though, no?
  - blitzar 1y ago
    To pay $100mil to ai devs. I have a theory that Meta execs was so focused on the Metaverse that the Ai team succeeded thanks to the lack of supervision and interference from above - there was probably a board discussion between 2019 and 2022 about firing them all and just focusing up the Metaverse stuff becuase they were dead weight on the core mission of colonizing the Metaverse. Turns out the Ai team was the lifeboat to save the drowning Metaverse.
    - froidpink 1y ago
      Meta has been investing in AI for more than a decade
      - gary_0 1y ago
        Longer than that, for sure. They were deploying ML systems at least as far back as 2011.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeRank
      - blitzar 1y ago
        And yet their quaterly and annual reports dont mention it at all till 2022 and the team are now being "helped out" by new $100mil talent. There is an amazing team there that did the work, I am just saying it wasnt the visionaries vision that made that happen - and if it was they certainly wouldnt have let the Ai team publish or opensource their work.
    - buyucu 1y ago
      In my experience success of a project is inversely proportional to executive attention. The best thing seniour leaders can do is to get out of the way.
- dragontamer 1y ago
  I thought Meta put a total of maybe 30Billion in Metaverse? A lot of wasted money but not 100B++
- cedws 1y ago
  Reality Labs is still a thing, they’re still working on VR/MR.
arethuza 1y ago
What if a lot of that advertising is from AI companies that are likely to fail in any downturn - didn't advertising drop fairly sharply during at the end of the dot-com bubble?
bee_rider 1y ago
It comes from the real economy in the sense that it is money they could be spent on something productive, but was instead wasted on ads.
- piva00 1y ago
  In a video I watched recently there was a breakdown of how much a plumbing company had to spend on "marketing" (aka: Google ads placement, Facebook/Instagram) to attract customers and their per-click pay was about 60 USD, they were spending around 16-18k USD per month on online ads to keep the business afloat. I had no idea that physical small businesses like that needed to spend so much on marketing just to be found.
  - jdross 1y ago
    The very first thing you discover as a business owner managing cashflow is how hard you must work to get customers versus to provide a service.
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    Have to seems like a strong phrase. I found my last plumber and window guy on a facebook neighborhood group. Local ads for general services can be quite expensive, but doing some marketing through local groups only costs your time. I can see how driving business though clicks is attractive, but I'd be surprised if there was no alternative.
    - piva00 1y ago
      Have to if you want to scale the business, if you are a sole trader doing small gigs it's probably very achievable to only use local groups. If you rely on people searching for "plumbers in <X> city" while running a small business with some 5-10 folks I don't think you'd get enough work.
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        You don't want to use a plumber that has scaled their business. That means that they're sending out a new hire to do your plumbing rather than the plumber that originally built the company's reputation. The best plumbers spend $0 on advertising. They've got enough business through repeat customers and word of mouth to keep their small set of plumbers busy, and they're expanding slowly enough to properly train apprentices and ensure quality.
RC_ITR 1y ago
Meta is also a great example of AI leading to higher user engagement today. Reels isn't powered by Transformers per se (likely more of a complex mix of ML techniques), but it is powered by honest-to-goodness SOTA AI/ML running on leading-edge Nvidia GPUs. I think, because they're so impressive, people assume Transformers = AI/ML, when there's plenty of other hyperscale AI/ML products on the market today.

Meta's profit has increased almost 2x since 2023. Meta makes money from advertisers spending money on Meta. So the profit growth from Meta does very much come from the real economy

blitzar 1y ago

Right around the time Meta stopped setting 100's of billions a year of cash on fire in the metaverse and pivoted to Ai.

philipallstar 1y ago
To open-sourcing AI models though, no?
- blitzar 1y ago
  To pay $100mil to ai devs. I have a theory that Meta execs was so focused on the Metaverse that the Ai team succeeded thanks to the lack of supervision and interference from above - there was probably a board discussion between 2019 and 2022 about firing them all and just focusing up the Metaverse stuff becuase they were dead weight on the core mission of colonizing the Metaverse. Turns out the Ai team was the lifeboat to save the drowning Metaverse.
  - froidpink 1y ago
    Meta has been investing in AI for more than a decade
    - gary_0 1y ago
      Longer than that, for sure. They were deploying ML systems at least as far back as 2011.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeRank
    - blitzar 1y ago
      And yet their quaterly and annual reports dont mention it at all till 2022 and the team are now being "helped out" by new $100mil talent. There is an amazing team there that did the work, I am just saying it wasnt the visionaries vision that made that happen - and if it was they certainly wouldnt have let the Ai team publish or opensource their work.
  - buyucu 1y ago
    In my experience success of a project is inversely proportional to executive attention. The best thing seniour leaders can do is to get out of the way.
dragontamer 1y ago
I thought Meta put a total of maybe 30Billion in Metaverse? A lot of wasted money but not 100B++
cedws 1y ago
Reality Labs is still a thing, they’re still working on VR/MR.

arethuza 1y ago

What if a lot of that advertising is from AI companies that are likely to fail in any downturn - didn't advertising drop fairly sharply during at the end of the dot-com bubble?

bee_rider 1y ago

It comes from the real economy in the sense that it is money they could be spent on something productive, but was instead wasted on ads.

piva00 1y ago
In a video I watched recently there was a breakdown of how much a plumbing company had to spend on "marketing" (aka: Google ads placement, Facebook/Instagram) to attract customers and their per-click pay was about 60 USD, they were spending around 16-18k USD per month on online ads to keep the business afloat. I had no idea that physical small businesses like that needed to spend so much on marketing just to be found.
- jdross 1y ago
  The very first thing you discover as a business owner managing cashflow is how hard you must work to get customers versus to provide a service.
- ch4s3 1y ago
  Have to seems like a strong phrase. I found my last plumber and window guy on a facebook neighborhood group. Local ads for general services can be quite expensive, but doing some marketing through local groups only costs your time. I can see how driving business though clicks is attractive, but I'd be surprised if there was no alternative.
  - piva00 1y ago
    Have to if you want to scale the business, if you are a sole trader doing small gigs it's probably very achievable to only use local groups. If you rely on people searching for "plumbers in <X> city" while running a small business with some 5-10 folks I don't think you'd get enough work.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      You don't want to use a plumber that has scaled their business. That means that they're sending out a new hire to do your plumbing rather than the plumber that originally built the company's reputation. The best plumbers spend $0 on advertising. They've got enough business through repeat customers and word of mouth to keep their small set of plumbers busy, and they're expanding slowly enough to properly train apprentices and ensure quality.

RC_ITR 1y ago

Meta is also a great example of AI leading to higher user engagement today. Reels isn't powered by Transformers per se (likely more of a complex mix of ML techniques), but it is powered by honest-to-goodness SOTA AI/ML running on leading-edge Nvidia GPUs. I think, because they're so impressive, people assume Transformers = AI/ML, when there's plenty of other hyperscale AI/ML products on the market today.