Facebook now has 2 billion users

Facebook now has 2 billion daily active users, and Meta will continue to bet big on the metaverse and generative AI.

After nearly twenty years of existence, Facebook continues to grow. The social network currently has at least 2 billion daily active users, Meta announced at the same time as its fourth-quarter financial results. It’s also the first time that Facebook, which added 16 million new users last quarter, has surpassed the two billion daily user mark.

Facebook now has 2 billion daily active users

While Facebook isn’t the first Meta-owned platform to hit the 2 billion daily user mark — WhatsApp got them just recently — it shows that the company’s biggest source of ad revenue is still in the pipeline. significant cost reduction in recent months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the company’s recent restructuring that led to the layoff of more than 11,000 employees, saying “Our main theme for 2023 is ‘Year of Efficiency’.”

But while Meta’s revenue is down year-over-year, the $32.2 billion the giant generated in the last quarter of 2022 slightly beat expectations, albeit 4% less than the previous year.

And Meta will continue to bet big on the metaverse and generative AI.

During a meeting with analysts, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Meta will continue to cut these costs in order to aim for even better performance. “We will be more aggressive in canceling projects that are not delivering results or are not as important as before,” he explained. The CEO also announced that generative AI will be a priority for Meta next year.

“Generative AI is an extremely exciting field with many different applications,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “And one of Meta’s goals is to build on our previous research to become a leader in generative AI.”

Meta also continues to lose a lot of money due to its investments in the metaverse. Reality Labs, the division that oversees all projects, VR, AR, and the metaverse, lost $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022 and nearly $14 billion for the full year, according to data provided by Meta. And the company reaffirmed that it expects to lose more money with Reality Labs next year. “We expect even bigger losses for Reality Labs in 2023,” Meta CFO Susan Li said.

While Reality Labs’ losses have obviously contributed a lot to Meta’s earnings slowdown over the past year, Mark Zuckerberg also says he’s confident the company is in the midst of a “very rapid phase shift”from previous years. “We can’t just run everything like hypergrowth. There will be certain areas that will grow very fast, or you could say an investment in the future that we want to achieve.”