One company people often forget is an AI-first, or artificial intelligence-first, company is Meta Platforms (META 0.34%), as it is associated more with the metaverse. However, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg consistently highlights on the company's earnings calls that AI is one of two technological waves driving its product roadmap.
People don't often perceive Meta as an AI-first company because it lacks highly publicized demonstrations of AI, like Alphabet's Deepmind AlphaGo project, the first computer program to defeat a professional human Go player; or OpenAI's ChatGPT release, a much-hyped AI chatbot system.
Despite a lack of a much-ballyhooed public demonstration of its AI prowess, investors should look at Meta Platforms when it comes time to invest in one of the industry's top AI companies. Here's why.
NASDAQ: META
Key Data Points
Meta monetizes its AI
There are plenty of AI research companies in the market, from organizations as large as Microsoft to tiny start-ups. What separates Meta from many of its AI competitors is that it is among the top companies able to monetize its AI research.
Like Google, Meta primarily monetizes its AI through advertising, and over 97% of its $116.6 billion in revenue in 2022 came from digital advertising. It uses sophisticated analytics and machine learning algorithms to match a brand's advertising objectives to users' behaviors on Meta's apps to estimate how likely a user is to take a desired action. That action could be anything from clicking on an ad to purchase a product, signing up for a newsletter, making a phone call, or downloading software.
Meta also uses AI in its content discovery engines. One of the secrets to making a platform more attractive so people will keep coming back and engaging with the content is to make it easy for users to find the content they want to see. So Meta also has built one of the world's most robust content discovery engines on the back of a sophisticated AI engine. As a result, Meta has one of the world's largest membership bases and the highest engagement metrics across its family of apps.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, its family daily active people (DAP) was 2.96 billion, and its family monthly active people (MAP) was 3.74 billion. If you divide DAP by MAP, you get its family of apps engagement number of 79% -- mind-blowing numbers. An engagement number is a measure of a platform's "stickiness," and a number above 60% is world-class. With an average audience of 2.96 billion highly engaged people visiting a Meta app daily, there is little wonder brands flock to advertise on Meta's apps.
Meta's use of AI in driving audience engagement and monetizing digital ads is essential in helping it generate billions of dollars -- ka-ching!
Don't believe the hype
At the end of November 2022, AI research company OpenAI released ChatGPT, possibly the fastest-growing app in history. Since its release, the public has been fascinated with AI. However, the technology behind ChatGPT is nothing new.
Several weeks before OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, Meta launched an online demo named Galactica, designed to perform similar functions as ChatGPT, only created strictly for scientists. The huge issue is that Galactica produced many erroneous outcomes. As a result, Galactica failed, and the company took down the demo three days later.
Although ChatGPT received a more positive reception from the public, the technology has similar flaws to Galactica. Additionally, ChatGPT comes with massive computing costs, and OpenAI and its financial backer, Microsoft, will need to figure out how to run the service profitably. Should OpenAI fail to develop a path for ChatGPT to achieve profitability, the service could quickly turn into nothing more than an expensive toy.
The flaws in Galactica and ChatGPT, along with recent reports of Google's new chatbot Bard giving a wrong answer in a public demo, should serve as a cautionary tale to investors that some AI benefits could prove challenging to achieve.
Buy Meta if you like profitable AI growth
Meta chases many of the same long-term moonshot goals as its AI competitors in computer vision, language comprehension, speech recognition, robotics, the metaverse, and more. After all, it has built the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) -- the fastest AI supercomputer in the world to achieve those goals.
However, unlike many AI companies, Meta heavily invests in AI to produce profits today. Meta is currently developing and deploying privacy-enhancing technologies and new AI tools that make its apps even more attractive destinations for marketers to advertise.
If you are looking for an AI company that produces profits for you today, few places are better to invest in than Meta.
