What you need to know
- Meta announced its Q3 2024 financial earnings.
- The company reported a revenue increase of 19% to $40.6 billion, aided by its AI efforts.
- Mark Zuckerberg teased Llama 4, which is expected to launch in 2025 with improved capabilities.
- Reality Labs saw a slight increase in revenue, but its losses continue to widen.
- Meta launched the more affordable Quest 3S recently, which is expected to be a hit during the holiday season.
Meta had a great quarter, as highlighted by its Q3 2024 earnings report on Wednesday. The company saw its revenue reach more than $40.5 billion, up 19% from the same quarter in 2023.
Ads made up the majority of Meta's revenue, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg also attributed the company's other ventures as key drivers of the increase, particularly AI.
"We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business," said Zuckerberg in a prepared statement. "We also have strong momentum with Meta AI, Llama adoption, and AI-powered glasses."
During the earnings call, Zuckerberg noted that AI usage is up, with more than 500 million users accessing Meta AI through its various apps, such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses are one such avenue that users can use to access Meta AI, making use of the company's Llama model for multimodal AI features, like being able to query about something you see or translate speech in real-time.
Zuckerberg also expressed excitement about the upcoming Llama 4 model, which he says is "well into development." He expects Llama 4 to launch in early 2025 with new modalities and stronger reasoning, saying it will be "much faster."
While AI is a big focus for Meta, the company is also seeing growth in Reality Labs, which handles its VR, AR, and mixed reality efforts, such as the Quest headset. This division is where the company sees heavy losses each quarter, and Q3 is no different. Losses jumped to $4.4 billion compared to $3.7 billion in Q3 2023, and the company expects losses to increase throughout 2024.
That said, it's not all bad. Revenue has also seen quite a bit of growth, hitting $270 million during the quarter. The Quest 3 has likely contributed to a large chunk of this, but Zuckerberg has also pointed out the strong demand for the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. The more affordable Quest 3S was also just launched, although it didn't hit shelves until after Q3 ended, with a strong opportunity for holiday sales to ramp up revenue.
