What you need to know
- Meta announced financial results for the third quarter of 2024.
- The company reported a 19% increase in revenue to $40.6 billion due to its AI efforts.
- Mark Zuckerberg teased Llama 4, which is expected to launch in 2025 with improved features.
- Reality Labs saw a slight increase in revenue, but its losses continue to widen.
- Meta recently launched the more affordable Quest 3S. This is expected to be a hit during the holiday season.
Meta had a great quarter, as highlighted in Wednesday’s Q3 2024 earnings report. The company’s revenue reached more than $40.5 billion, an increase of 19% from the same quarter in 2023.
While advertising makes up the majority of Meta’s revenue, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also believes the company’s other businesses, particularly AI, are key drivers of the increase.
“We had a strong quarter driven by advances in AI across our apps and business,” Zuckerberg said in a prepared statement. “There is also strong momentum in meta-AI, Llama adoption, and AI-powered glasses.”
Zuckerberg noted during the earnings call that the use of AI is on the rise, with more than 500 million users accessing Meta AI through various apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses are one of the ways users can access Meta AI, which provides multimodal AI capabilities such as the ability to query what you’re looking at and translate audio in real-time. uses the company’s Llama model.
Zuckerberg also expressed excitement about the upcoming Rama 4 model, saying that “development is progressing well.” He expects Rama 4 to be released in early 2025 with new methods and more powerful inference, saying it will be “much faster.”
While Meta has a big focus on AI, the company is also seeing growth in Reality Labs, which handles VR, AR, and mixed reality efforts such as the Quest headset. This division is one in which the company posts large losses every quarter, and the third quarter is no exception. Losses jumped to $4.4 billion from $3.7 billion in the third quarter of 2023, and the company expects losses to increase throughout 2024.
However, it’s not all bad. Revenue also increased significantly, reaching $270 million during the quarter. The Quest 3 is likely a big contributor to this, but Zuckerberg also pointed to strong demand for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The more affordable Quest 3S also just launched, but won’t hit shelves until the end of the third quarter, when holiday sales will likely boost revenue.
