You may think of social media when you think of Meta Platforms (META 0.34%). After all, the company owns some of the most popular apps in the space, from Facebook and Messenger to WhatsApp and Instagram. But Meta isn’t just about social media.
The company has made it clear that it aims to win in the high-potential market of artificial intelligence (AI), too. Over the past few years, Meta has increased its spending in the technology and forged ahead with the development of key innovations, such as large language models (LLMs) and AI assistants.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg recently said the tech giant would invest as much as $65 billion in AI infrastructure this year and expand its AI teams. This is after already calling AI the key investment area in 2024.
On top of this, during the company’s latest earnings report, Zuckerberg made three startling AI predictions. Should you get in on Meta stock before these predictions come true?
Image source: Getty Images.
More than 3.3 billion daily Meta users
First, here’s a quick look at the Meta story so far. The company owns today’s top social media apps — more than 3.3 billion people worldwide use at least one of them every day. This offers Meta a pretty solid moat, or competitive advantage.
If you drop WhatsApp, for example, and head over to a rival app, you may not find all your contacts on that other platform, which encourages users to stick with Meta’s popular offerings. This is Meta’s key to revenue.
Advertisers flock to advertise across Meta’s apps — where they know they’ll find consumers — to tell them about their products and services. This translates into billions of dollars in revenue and profit for the company. Meanwhile, Meta has broadened its research and expertise into other areas such as AI, and this could benefit the social media business and offer the company the possibility of developing other revenue streams down the road.
Meta already had set a goal of bringing on board 600,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), the high-powered chips for AI, last year. Most recently, the company said it aims to have 1.3 million GPUs by the end of this year. It has used this compute to train Llama, its own LLM, and now has advanced to the fourth generation.
Meta has made Llama open source, so anyone can access it and contribute to its development and use. The advantage of this is that open source software often leads to the creation of an industry standard, which could establish Meta as a leader.
Meta’s intelligent and personalized AI assistant
Now let’s consider Zuckerberg’s three show-stopping AI predictions for the year. The first has to do with Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant.
Zuckerberg says he expects “a highly intelligent and personalized” AI assistant will reach 1 billion users in 2025 and predicts Meta AI will be the one. He also says that this year, Llama will become “the most advanced and widely used” LLM.
The Meta CEO says Llama 4 will have agentic capabilities. This could be key to unlocking significant growth, since AI agents involve applying AI to real-world problems. Agents are able to reason out complex problems and execute solutions, something that could be transformative for users.
Finally, Zuckerberg says that this year, it will be possible to build an AI engineering agent with abilities that rival that of a mid-level engineer. He calls this “potentially one of the most important innovations in history” and says the company that accomplishes it first will have a clear advantage. A few weeks ago, Meta said it planned to build an AI engineer to help with coding as it expands its AI research and development efforts.
The right tools to reach big goals
Let’s get back to the question: Should you take Zuckerberg’s predictions as a reason to get in on Meta stock now before these goals become a reality?
It’s too early to predict whether Meta will be successful across all three points, but it’s fair to say the company is offering itself all of the necessary tools to get there. Meta also is financially sound, so it can afford to invest in AI and continue delivering growth to investors through gains in revenue, as well as share repurchases and dividends.
Meta has said in the past that its major investments always have taken time to bear fruit, and this won’t be an exception. But 2025 could be a key moment along the way and a time when investors will start to see signs of Meta’s potential in this high-growth area.
For starters, a widely used AI assistant may spur users to spend even more time on Meta’s apps, and that could encourage advertisers to increase their spending there. All of this means that now, after Mark Zuckerberg’s big predictions, it’s a great time to buy Meta shares and hold on as this growth story unfolds.
Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Adria Cimino has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
