Meta AI: Zuckerberg Bets Big on Personal Agents Despite $4.6B Reality Labs Loss

Meta says AI is making it easier to build new apps -- and more are coming

Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week's second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social giant has new apps in the works, following a recent spate of other launches that included an app for Marketplace sellers, one for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a newphotos app from Instagram, and an experiment involving AI bedtime stories. Meta has spent years trying and failing to produce new, standalone social apps to complement its core platforms. Now, the company says that large language models (LLMs) make it possible to ship software faster, allowing it to test new ideas at a quicker pace. "I'm...excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development," Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday's call. "Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a standalone Groups app, and Seller, a standalone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps. So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them," he said. "AI is improving our core business; it's making our apps more relevant and delivering better results for businesses. We're starting to deliver more novel products, and we'll have a lot more there soon as well," Zuckerberg said. Meta has been down this road before. In its earlier days, Meta (then known as Facebook) ran an internal incubator called Creative Labs, which aimed to test new social concepts. That effort produced a handful of launches: the photo-sharing app Slingshot, an anonymous chat app Rooms, a Flipboard competitor called Paper, the Moments photo-sharing app, and a collaborative video app known as Riff. Those experiments came to an end in 2015, and the apps were eventually all shuttered, as the company struggled to find an audience for its efforts. In the early 2020s, Meta tried again, this time with an internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tested apps that included the chat app Bump, social music app Aux, task app Move, dating app Spark, calling app CatchUp, zine maker E.gg, events app Venue, creator Q&A app Hotline, Cameo competitor Super, couples app Tuned, music app BARS, and others. Again, none became a breakout success, and the apps were shut down. Now Meta can point to at least one example of how AI is helping new apps scale. It has finally delivered a modest hit with Threads, which now has 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg likes to say Threads will one day become the company's next billion-user app. With Threads, Meta learned to heavily lean on its existing user base to help initially seed the app with people, then continued to heavily promote it across its existing platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. But LLMs are another key factor in Threads' growth, as the company said it sees "significant gains" from its AI-powered content recommendations. "We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains," Meta's CFO Susan Li told investors on the call. "First, they make our existing systems smarter by understanding what the content is actually about and generating better training data. Second, LLM-powered agents are also helping with engineering development by evaluating content quality, detecting trends, and testing ranking changes." Li added that earlier this year, Meta reached a milestone: every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM and analyzed for topic and tone, which helps improve recommendations. The company is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which could help it to better scale new apps as they arrive. Investors didn't follow up with company executives to ask more questions about the new apps Meta has in the works, as they were more concerned with AI spending and Meta's growing enterprise ambitions. However, Zuckerberg suggested that people won't have long to wait to see what's next, saying the "new consumer products" were "releasing soon."

Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future -- one where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. (Let's hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents -- without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.) "I think that it's extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example -- whatever period of time you want -- that you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about," Zuckerberg said on Wednesday's quarterly earnings call with investors. He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management. "As we move toward a future where we're all interacting with multiple agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important," he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI. Meta is not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person's behalf rather than just answer questions. Google emphasized custom AI agents as a key new feature in its Search overhaul, which sparked outcry from users who felt bogged down by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic's Claude have skyrocketed as engineers fawn over the agentic coding assistant Claude Code. Compared to its competitors, however, Meta may not enjoy as much confidence from investors as it continues dumping cash into innovative projects that may or may not pan out -- Meta's stock dropped almost 10% after posting this quarter's earnings. Meta's Reality Labs, the organization responsible for its AR glasses, VR headsets, and related software, lost around $4.6 billion this quarter, roughly in line with the losses the division has posted each quarter since 2021. That's a running total now of around $88 billion. Meta's AI spending is likely to climb even higher, which is more of a concern at this juncture. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion the same quarter last year. That's a 91% drop year over year, exacerbated by the company's investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas. "We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there's a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well," Zuckerberg said. Ultimately, he believes that the personal agents that Meta is developing will be "the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead." So far, Meta's business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than one million businesses. It may be harder to get people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the road to "billions" has to start somewhere -- the company can't get there on enterprise agents alone.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Putting All His Chips on an AI Future, Whether You Want It or Not - CNET

Aaron covers what's exciting and new in the world of home entertainment and streaming TV.... Read full bio Meta is betting big on AI. But will CEO Mark Zuckerberg's investment in the technology ultimately pay off? That's one of the major questions lingering after Wednesday's earnings call, which announced Meta's second-quarter loss of over $4.6 billion in its Reality Labs sector. Throughout the hour-long call, Zuckerberg spoke about Meta's business across its slate of social media apps - Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp - and the overall message he kept driving home was the role of AI within the company and for the people using Meta's products daily. At the center of all this is MuseSpark, the AI model created by Meta's Superintelligence Labs. With it, Zuckerberg said Meta is hard at work on making a variety of AI agents to streamline workflows for small businesses and enhance the lives of individual Meta users. "Soon we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want," Zuckerberg said. If you've been paying attention to all the Zuckerberg news that's fit to print, you may know that Meta's CEO has been building a personal AI assistant for himself. Considering his hardline stance on making AI available to all (see his New York Times interview for more on this), it makes sense that he'd extend this technology to the billions of people who use Meta's apps worldwide. Privacy is a major concern when it comes to AI models, whether for business or personal use. Zuckerberg said during the call that Meta is making "strong privacy and security a fundamental part of the agents" it is building. In the same breath, though, he pointed to Meta's Ray-Bans smart glasses as the ideal product to deliver this functionality to people -- the same tech item that many on social media have begun calling "pervert glasses." Instagram is cracking down on content captured with the glasses, but this use case raises a broader concern about how people's information will be used by these proposed AI assistants if Zuckerberg's big bet on superintelligence for all pays off. More than 1 million businesses have been using Meta business agents on WhatsApp and Messenger, Zuckerberg said Wednesday. Instagram is next for this type of agentic AI, which learns over time what customers need and delivers those insights back to the business to help shape overall strategies. This is a "business-in-a-box service" that Meta is aiming to build, which can help you start and run your whole business using the service's platforms. The primary goal, repeated throughout the earnings call, is to put superintelligence directly into people's hands rather than centralize it. "We are focused on distributing it widely and giving everyone the ability to direct it towards what matters to them," Zuckerberg continued. "That's the way that society has always made progress, and I think these are the right values for building a positive AI future." What does that future look like, exactly? According to Meta's CEO, billions of people will have a personal agent that is locked in on their goals and works nonstop to help you acheive them. "I get that this is sort of a big bet across the industry," he said, in what could be viewed as a bit of an understatement. As part of Meta's earnings report, Reality Labs -- the part of the company that develops its VR headsets and smart glasses -- generated $431 million in revenue, while its operating loss widened to $4.6 billion. Since 2020, the division has racked up total operating losses of $80 billion. In response to this loss, which comes two days after Meta's new investment to build a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, Meta's stock price dropped by 10% by the end of Wednesday. "There's a bit of similarity to Meta's metaverse missteps in that Meta is once again spending ahead of proven product demand," Forrester Research Director Mike Proulx told CNET. "The difference is that AI adoption and value are real. The technology is different, but the market's patience is starting to look familiar." Zuckerberg seemed unfazed by the loss during the earnings call, acknowledging the reactions to Meta's spending push on AI. "My personal bet is that the people who invest in this are going to be rewarded and feel very good over time." Overall for the second quarter, Meta announced revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28%, and net income of $15.8 billion, down 14% from a year earlier. Total costs and expenses were $42 billion, an increase of 55%.

Mark Zuckerberg is planning a big push into personal AI agents

Meta is all-in on AI, and sometime soon, the company is going to make a big push into personal AI agents that can do things on your behalf. On Wednesday's Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed a high-level vision of how the company is thinking about personal agents and what it will do to make them viable for users -- and how it will convince less technical people to give them a shot: Soon we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want. The first domain that agents have really taken off in is coding. But engineers are more technical and willing to spend time making those agents work, so to build great personal agents, this needs to be a great consumer product that just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people to adopt and use. Zuckerberg seems to be trying to differentiate his vision from that of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which have invested heavily in agents focused on coding and enterprise work. Google has also made a push into personal AI agents with its Gemini Spark tool, which I found to be very good but to an almost creepy degree, and it's unclear right now how Meta's potential agents might compare. However, Meta could have an uphill battle in personal agents. Its AI efforts still lag behind the bigger AI labs. Unlike Google or Microsoft, it doesn't have ecosystem access to people's email or documents in the way Google or Microsoft do. And Meta is dealing with a different creep problem right now with smart glasses, and general distrust toward Meta might make people unwilling to use its agents. The company will have more to share about its personal agents "soon," Zuckerberg said. Earlier in the call, he said that personal agents will be "the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead." Zuckerberg also highlighted Meta's business agents that are available on WhatsApp and Messenger, and he said that more than 1 million businesses are using them every week. The business agents are being rolled out to Instagram as well, Zuckerberg said. Meta's big move into agents follows the launch of its Muse Spark AI model last quarter, which it recently updated with a 1.1 update that offers better coding capabilities. The company has restructured itself to focus heavily on AI, reportedly moving 7,000 staffers to work on new AI initiatives, though it also laid off about 8,000 people in May. The company is also investing heavily in compute, noting in today's earnings that it expects to spend $130 to $145 billion in capital expenditures in 2026. Yesterday, it announced that it's building a 1 gigawatt data center campus in partnership with BlackRock. During the Q2 2026 earnings call, Zuckerberg also said that Instagram now has more than 2 billion daily active users.

Zuckerberg says Meta's enterprise AI opportunity extends beyond agents

In June, Meta entered the enterprise AI market with a new AI agent aimed at businesses, to help with customer service, support, and other daily operations. But the tech giant's enterprise AI ambitions are much more expansive, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday's second-quarter earnings call. "We see a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we're building for large customers," Zuckerberg said. These additions could potentially position the business to create new revenue streams beyond advertising, which drives the bulk of its business, and subscriptions, which contribute a smaller share. Initially, the company will focus on the opportunity to serve its existing base of advertisers by offering AI agents that work across messaging apps and elsewhere. These allow businesses to interact with their own customers through an AI interface. "And, just like the ad system, effectively, we will get paid when we deliver results for those businesses," Zuckerberg said. "We view this as an extension of the sales and the partnerships that we have with many millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of small businesses that use our platforms." He also fleshed out how Meta could expand beyond serving the small business customer that makes up much of its current advertiser base by offering Meta's internal tools to external customers in the future. "There are other enterprise customers who I think we're increasingly going to serve, too," Zuckerberg explained. "We're building coding and developing and internal productivity tools partially because we need to build them ourselves, and we need to make sure that we have tools that are tuned for ourselves," he continued. "Now that we have those, we feel like there's a large opportunity to serve -- whether that's small businesses or larger businesses." This shift in focus may not come easy -- Zuckerberg admitted that selling to the enterprise was a "different muscle" than the one Meta has historically flexed. Meanwhile, in terms of Meta selling compute to enterprise customers, Meta is focused on balancing its need for revenue and its need to execute on its own future plans. That said, the company pointed out multiple times that it currently has the opportunity to sell compute at "a significant premium over what we paid for it." Still, Zuckerberg cautioned investors that it "would be foolish" to "sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit." Instead, he described Meta's approach as a "portfolio" that included a mix of long-term and short-term plans for its compute infrastructure. "As we get closer to personal superintelligence, we are . . . going to need hardware that allows you to seamlessly interact with it," he noted. The call also focused on Meta's sizable ambitions around agentic AI -- AI systems that can act on a person's or business's behalf, rather than just answer questions -- which won't only be offered to businesses. Consumers, too, are being promised "personal AI agents," as well AI smartglasses that can interact with the world in front of them. Plus, Meta is using AI technology -- specifically, large language models -- to more rapidly build out its suite of social apps. Recent launches on this front have included an app for Marketplace sellers, another for Facebook Groups, one for vibe-coded games, and other experiments. More are on the way, Zuckerberg teased. "I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps," said Zuckerberg. "So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them to the people who will find them interesting."

Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Centralization of A.I. Power

In an interview, Meta's chief executive took aim at Anthropic and OpenAI, which have pushed to tightly control A.I. development, and said he supported "more openness." Mark Zuckerberg came out swinging against Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the world's most valuable artificial intelligence start-ups, saying the way they developed A.I. software could lead to a centralization of power that would narrow people's access to the transformational technology. In an interview on Tuesday, the 42-year-old chief executive of Meta did not call out Anthropic and OpenAI by name. But he said leading research labs that want to develop A.I. technology in a tightly controlled manner -- as Anthropic and OpenAI have done -- would be akin to "abandoning our values" in American tech development and would stifle innovation. "So much of the discourse from a lot of the other labs that are developing this is overwhelmingly filled with doom," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "There needs to be a voice or several voices that are bringing realism to this debate." The comments from Mr. Zuckerberg, who rarely gives interviews to traditional news organizations, escalate a fraught debate over how artificial intelligence software should be created that has divided Silicon Valley. Technologists like Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, have said some of today's leading A.I. models are too dangerous to be shared and developed without tight controls. But Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and Meta have disagreed, contending that many A.I. models must be developed largely in the open for people to advance the technology and build new businesses. The discord heightened this month as breakthroughs in Chinese A.I. models appeared to erode the head start that American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have enjoyed. The companies have lobbied regulators in Washington, raising concerns about Chinese open-source A.I. models. On Friday, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, posted a letter supporting open-source software development, which others in Silicon Valley rallied around. This week, Mr. Huang announced a coalition to work on open-source safety and cybersecurity tools for A.I., joined by other tech giants like SpaceX and IBM. Tech executives including Mr. Huang and Mr. Altman are traveling to Washington this week to further make their case to the Trump administration, which is mulling how to deal with the issue. Amid the battle, Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly argued that more people should have access to A.I. technology rather than less, a tacit criticism of Mr. Amodei and Mr. Altman. Mr. Amodei, in particular, has called out the dangers of "alignment risk," an issue with programming artificial intelligence in a way that is safe toward humans. "I think a lot of people have this notion that if you build some kind of singular A.I. you can, through some idealized form of alignment, make sure it is benevolent to humanity," Mr. Zuckerberg said in the interview. "I'm personally skeptical of that path." He instead called for "personalized superintelligence" for everyone, which would mean configuring A.I. bots to suit people's needs and desires. A central "benevolent" A.I. superpower, he argued, would be untenable because people have different views and value systems. "I think it is literally impossible to have a single benevolent superintelligence that is simultaneously aligned with everyone at once," Mr. Zuckerberg said. Representatives from Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In previous statements, OpenAI has said it supports open-source software and is working with the White House on safe ways to support A.I. development. In a blog post on Monday, Mr. Amodei said Anthropic was focused on "keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed." (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news articles. The two companies have denied the claims.) Meta's own philosophy around A.I. development has fluctuated. For years, the company championed open-source A.I. and gave away its A.I. models for free. Last spring, after falling behind Anthropic and OpenAI in the A.I. race, Mr. Zuckerberg took action. He invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI, an A.I. start-up, and hired its founder, Alexandr Wang, to revamp Meta's A.I. division, which was renamed Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta spent billions to assemble a team of all-star A.I. researchers around Mr. Wang and they began developing an A.I. model that was not open, but closed. The move gave Meta the potential to sell access to new models for more revenue. This month, it began selling access to its latest A.I. model, Muse Spark, for the first time. Meta also continues to develop open-source models. Mr. Zuckerberg has long believed that A.I. will transform society in positive ways that are yet to be understood. This month, Meta released a national advertising campaign saying that investing in A.I. tools and releasing them broadly meant the company was "betting on people." The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Mr. Zuckerberg this week in which he criticized "centralizing" of A.I. power and said he believed in "individual empowerment, invention and balance of power." In the article, he did not name Anthropic and OpenAI. In Tuesday's interview, Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged the A.I. debate was contentious and noted that talks with different parties in Silicon Valley and Washington had been productive. "I don't know if the goal is to have everyone agree on everything," he said. "Almost by definition, if you believe what I do, you don't need to convince everyone of everything." Looking back over the course of technology, he said, democratization of tech tools has tended to eventually win out. "I believe the general arc of the industry has been toward more openness and putting the power of tech into more people's hands, not fewer," he said.

Mark Zuckerberg says billions will have a personal AI agent within five years

On Meta's earnings call, the CEO made his boldest AI prediction yet, even as Reality Labs bled $4.6bn and the stock fell 10%. Mark Zuckerberg thinks almost everyone will soon have an AI that works for them. On Meta's second-quarter earnings call on 29 July, he predicted that within five years "billions of people" will each have "a personal agent that understands your goals," handling their finances, health, relationships, and homes. It was the boldest version yet of a pitch he has been sharpening for months. Mark Zuckerberg has cast personal AI agents as the next mass-market computing platform, and Meta's own apps, WhatsApp and Messenger, as the place most people will meet them. The prediction is also a business plan. Meta already runs AI agents for companies on its messaging apps, reaching more than a million business users this quarter, and the consumer version is meant to become a revenue stream large enough to justify the money going in. That money is the uncomfortable backdrop. Meta's free cash flow fell 91% in the quarter, to $784 million, and its Reality Labs division lost another $4.6 billion, bringing its cumulative losses since 2021 to roughly $88 billion. The infrastructure bill keeps climbing on top of that. Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion data-centre partnership in El Paso this quarter, one more sign that the company is building for the agent future long before the revenue exists to pay for it. Investors were not soothed by the vision. Meta's stock fell nearly 10% after the results, a sign that Wall Street is, for now, more moved by the collapsing cash flow than by the promise of an agent in every pocket. He has a history of declaring the next platform early, from the metaverse to AI, and of spending vast sums to be first, with results that have ranged from dominant to disappointing. His own agents have not all arrived on schedule. Zuckerberg conceded earlier this year that Meta's AI-agent progress was slower than he had hoped, which makes the confidence of a five-year, billions-of-users forecast a notable bet on a sharp acceleration. He is, at least, using the products himself. Zuckerberg has talked about building a personal assistant to handle his own executive load, a hint of the everyday, do-things-for-you agent he expects the rest of the world to adopt. The vision is coherent, whatever its odds. If agents become the way people manage money, health, and household admin, whoever owns the agent owns an extraordinary position, which is why Meta, OpenAI, and Google are all racing for the same ground. He is not the only one. OpenAI, Google, and a wave of startups are making near-identical promises, which lends the idea momentum but also means that being right about agents is not the same as winning them. The catch is the same for all of them. Building agents that reliably act on someone's behalf, with their money and their data, is far harder than building a chatbot that answers questions, and trust is not something a demo can manufacture. For Meta specifically, there is a credibility gap to close. This is a company fighting lawsuits over how its existing products affect users, now asking those same users to hand an AI agent the keys to their finances and health. Regulators may have views on that too. Giving an agent access to someone's bank account and medical history raises exactly the privacy questions Meta is already fighting, which could slow the very future Zuckerberg is describing. Mark Zuckerberg's answer is to spend his way through the doubt. Meta's capital budget is heading toward $145 billion, a bet that if it builds the infrastructure and the models, the agents, and the billions of users, will follow. The five-year clock is now running, at least rhetorically. Zuckerberg has named a number and a date; the market's tepid response suggests it would rather see the agents than hear about them, and the gap between the two is where the next few years will be decided.

Mark Zuckerberg wants AI superintelligence in everyone's hands

Meta says it can bring advanced AI to billions of people, though access won't give users control over the infrastructure, safeguards, or limits behind it In an opinion essay for The Wall Street Journal, Mark Zuckerberg lays out a modest ambition for Meta's AI. He wants to put superintelligence in everyone's hands, giving ordinary people technology powerful enough to improve their health or help them work. Zuckerberg presents personal superintelligence as an alternative to advanced AI being controlled by a few institutions. Meta can certainly distribute it on a scale few companies could match. What users would receive is an assistant built and governed somewhere else, with its most important decisions made for them. How Meta can reach billions Meta's apps averaged 3.56 billion daily active users in March 2026. More than 1 billion people already use Meta AI each month. That reach makes Zuckerberg's distribution plan unusually plausible. Meta wouldn't need to sell another gadget or persuade people to join an unfamiliar service. It could quietly place increasingly capable AI inside apps billions already open, allowing superintelligence to arrive as another update waiting beside the usual collection of new buttons. Who still controls the superintelligence Wide availability won't change who builds the technology. Stanford's 2026 AI Index found that industry produced more than 90% of notable frontier models in 2025. Developing them requires computing power and money concentrated among a small number of companies. Recommended Videos Meta expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on infrastructure in 2026 alone. Users won't decide how the models are built or which safeguards they follow. Those choices remain with the company paying for the data centers. Personal superintelligence could give far more people powerful AI tools. Meta would still decide which ones reach them and where their limits sit. Do Americans actually want it Availability assumes an appetite that isn't guaranteed. A June 2026 Pew survey found that 63% of Americans believe AI is advancing too quickly. Only 8% have high confidence that American companies will develop it responsibly. Meta already has enough reach to put advanced AI in front of billions. The next detail to watch is whether users gain meaningful control over its safeguards and limits, or merely another Meta feature they never asked for.

Zuckerberg says billions will have personal AI agents within 5 years

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expects billions of people to have personal AI agents within five years, laying out the vision on the company's quarterly earnings call. Zuckerberg said those agents could help users with finances, health, interpersonal relationships and household management, and added that Meta's messaging apps would play a central role in how people use them. "I think that it's extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example, whatever period of time you want, that you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about," Zuckerberg said on Wednesday's call with investors. He said WhatsApp and Meta's other messaging platforms would become more important as people interact with multiple AI agents. Zuckerberg said WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI. Meta said its business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than 1 million businesses. Zuckerberg said Meta sees selling intelligence as a higher-margin business than selling computing power directly, while also seeing an opportunity in compute. He said personal agents under development at Meta would be "the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead." Investor concerns over Meta's AI spending persisted after the results. Meta's stock fell almost 10% after the company posted quarterly earnings. Meta's Reality Labs division, which handles AR glasses, VR headsets and related software, lost about $4.6 billion in the quarter. The article said that was broadly in line with quarterly losses the unit has posted since 2021, bringing the cumulative total to about $88 billion. Meta reported free cash flow of $784 million for the quarter, down from $8.55 billion in the same period last year. The article said the 91% year-over-year decline was exacerbated by the company's investments in AI infrastructure. Meta and BlackRock announced this week a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas. The article said Meta is not alone in pushing AI agents. Google recently emphasized custom AI agents in its Search overhaul, while Anthropic has seen subscriptions to Claude rise as engineers adopt its Claude Code assistant.

Meta Stock Falls After-Hours Even as Mark Zuckerberg Hypes Agents - Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), Alphabe

Mark Zuckerberg Says Personal AI Agents Could Soon Help Billions Manage Their Lives -- and Meta is Going All In: 'Almost Inevitable' Meta Sees Personal AI Agents as the Next Big Market During Meta's second-quarter earnings call, Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik asked whether consumer AI adoption could move beyond using chatbots as "glorified search" tools and whether a breakthrough was approaching. Zuckerberg said some AI products have already gained traction, pointing to the rapid growth of coding agents over the past year. He described coding as the first major agentic AI market because developers are technically sophisticated, willing to experiment and more comfortable working with tools that require setup and troubleshooting. But bringing AI agents to consumers on a massive scale presents a different challenge. "If you're trying to build something that isn't used by millions of people but is used by billions of people, it needs to just work," Zuckerberg said. AI Agents Could Work Around the Clock Zuckerberg said he believes it is "extremely unlikely" that, within roughly five years, billions of people will not have personal AI agents that understand their goals and work on their behalf around the clock. Those agents could help users manage their health, hobbies, personal finances, careers, relationships, household responsibilities and productivity, he said. Meta is Betting on Its Scale Meta is pursuing personal AI agents alongside Meta AI, business-focused agents and advanced AI models capable of enabling new products. Zuckerberg argued that Meta's experience building consumer products for billions of people could give it an advantage. The company also has the infrastructure needed to support computationally intensive AI services at a global scale. Still, he acknowledged that Meta has yet to launch the type of personal AI agent he envisions. "I kind of understand that we need to deliver it for our community," Zuckerberg said. "That's what we're very focused on." Meta Q2 Revenue Beats Estimates, CapEx Outlook Rises Meta reported second-quarter revenue of $60.80 billion, beating Wall Street estimates of $59.50 billion, while adjusted earnings of $6.18 per share missed expectations of $7.13. Revenue rose 28% year over year. For the third quarter, Meta forecast revenue of $61 billion to $64 billion, compared with estimates of $62.68 billion. The company raised the lower end of its full-year 2026 expense outlook to $165 billion from $162 billion and lifted its capital expenditure forecast to $130 billion to $145 billion, up from $125 billion to $145 billion. Price Action: Meta closed Wednesday's session at $585.61, down 1.31% and fell another 7.45% to $542 in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro. According to Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings, Meta scores in the 89th percentile for Growth, although the stock has lagged across the short, medium and long term. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo Courtesy: FotoField on Shutterstock.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Zuckerberg Says Billions Will Rely on Personal AI Agents | PYMNTS.com

"It's extremely unlikely, if you look out five years from now, that you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company's second quarter earnings call Wednesday (July 29), describing software "working on your behalf 24/7" across health, finances, relationships and careers. That vision, for every one of Meta's 3.6 billion daily users to have an assistant that never clocks out dominated Meta's earnings call. Zuckerberg spent his opening remarks describing a future where personal agents handle everything from health to finances, and the rest of the call built directly on that premise: how Meta pays for it, what stands in the way, and why the company believes it will win anyway. The vision runs into a hard constraint almost immediately: supply. "There's just nowhere near enough compute for all the demand," Zuckerberg said, explaining that Meta is fielding offers to sell its own capacity at a premium but prefers to build intelligence on top of it instead, where the margins run higher. That scarcity is why Meta is racing to stand up the agent layer now, even in pieces. Meta Superintelligence Labs shipped its Muse Spark 1.1 and Muse Image models this quarter, and daily interactions with the Meta AI assistant have climbed sharply since it's rebuild. Business agents are already live for more than a million businesses on WhatsApp and Messenger, handling customer inquiries and completed sales without a person in the loop. Zuckerberg pointed to Brazilian rental company Movida as the model he wants to replicate: a WhatsApp agent that runs the entire booking flow start to finish, resolving the vast majority of conversations without human help. That is the pattern Meta is betting will scale to billions of people next. Zuckerberg's Case for Why Meta Wins the AI Bet Scarce compute raises an obvious question: Why should Meta, rather than a rival, end up owning this? Zuckerberg's answer rests on distribution and the flywheel it creates. "When we have a product and a format that works, I would go as far as to say that I think we're probably the best company in the world at scaling those experiences to billions of people," he said, describing how usage data feeds back into the models that improve the products. He did not pretend the wager was small. "I get that this is a big investment and it's a big bet," Zuckerberg said. "My personal bet is that the people who invest in this are going to be rewarded and feel very good over time." That confidence is the thesis the entire call built toward: an ad business strong enough to fund an all-in push into personal agents, aimed at a future Zuckerberg is convinced is coming regardless of who builds it. What Else Stood Out * Meta hired Kunal Shah, founder of Indian payments company CRED, as its new head of WhatsApp. Zuckerberg said Shah built one of India's largest payment companies. * Instagram reached 2 billion daily active users. Threads crossed 500 million monthly actives, which Zuckerberg called the fastest-growing conversation app ever. * WhatsApp peaked at 30 million messages sent per second during the World Cup final, an all-time record for the platform. * AI-driven ranking improvements increased ad clicks and conversions across Meta's platforms. Advantage+ automated campaigns continue to scale as a core part of ad delivery * Meta launched Meta One, a new subscription offering more tools and AI features across its apps, with plans to add further tiers and pricing options * Zuckerberg revealed that every public Reels and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically run through an LLM and analyzed across dimensions like topic and tone, a milestone the company hit this year. Topline Growth and Future Outlook Meta reported total revenue of $60.8 billion for the quarter, up 28% year over year, with advertising revenue of $59.4 billion, up 27%. Ad impressions grew 14% and the average price per ad rose 12%. Family of apps other revenue crossed $1 billion for the first time, up 73%. Capital expenditures for the quarter reached $31.1 billion, while free cash flow came in at $784 million. Meta ended the quarter with $90.3 billion in cash and marketable securities against $83.7 billion in debt, and headcount stood at roughly 75,000, down 3%, reflecting about 8,000 employees affected by May's reduction. Looking ahead, Meta guided to third-quarter 2026 revenue of $61 billion to $64 billion, full-year 2026 expenses of $165 billion to $169 billion, and full-year 2026 capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion, with the floor raised from its prior outlook. The company did not provide specific guidance for 2027 capex.

Meta Q2FY261- Why It Is Betting on Personal AI Agents

"Soon, we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances -- whatever you want", Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company's Q2FY26 earnings call, where he detailed Meta's plan to build and push personal agents at scale. Zuckerberg said the company is building personal agents, expanding enterprise AI offerings and investing aggressively in compute capacity to support future products. Meta also reported strong growth across its platforms; 3.6 billion people use at least one of its apps daily, alongside new AI models, subscription offerings and hardware designed around what it calls personal superintelligence. Meta is betting on personal agents becoming a massive market: Zuckerberg positioned personal agents as the next major AI product category after coding assistants. He said the challenge is building "a great consumer product that just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people to adopt and use." During the analyst Q&A, Zuckerberg said Meta believes "consumer personal agents is going to end up being an extremely important and massive market." He added, "I think that it's extremely unlikely, if you look out five years from now, for example, that- or whatever period of time you want, you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals, and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals." WhatsApp as a primary platform: Meta said its messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp, will serve as the primary interface for personal AI agents. Zuckerberg said, "WhatsApp is already the leading surface where people engage with Meta AI, and as we build out a platform for more agents across our messaging apps, we're going to innovate on how to deliver a private and secure AI experience." During the quarter, Meta launched Incognito Mode on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, allowing people to have "private conversations with their assistant that even Meta can't see." Zuckerberg added, "We're planning to make strong privacy and security a fundamental part of the agents that we're building as well." Meta's Business Agents have more than 1 million billion users: Meta also highlighted early adoption of its enterprise AI products. Zuckerberg said, "We made Meta Business Agents available globally this quarter on WhatsApp and Messenger, and there are already more than 1 million businesses using them to talk to their customers or complete sales every week." The company has started rolling the service out on Instagram while adding new capabilities. Zuckerberg said Meta is "building more agentic capabilities to summarize all these conversations, digest what happened overnight, and surface what customers are asking for." Meta ultimately wants to build "a business-in-a-box service that can help you start and run a whole business using Meta's platforms." How LLMs are performing in recommender systems: The company said LLMs in recommender systems introduced last quarter are increasingly driving improvements to content ranking and recommendations across Facebook and Instagram. Susan Li, Meta Chief Financial Officer, said every public Reels and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM, which analyses content across dimensions including topics and tone before feeding signals into ranking, recommendations and content policy enforcement. During the quarter, Meta also began using its Muse family of models for video topic classification and summarisation. On Instagram, global time spent grew by double digits, while Facebook video time spent increased 9% globally. Meta also deployed its largest Reels ranking update to date, lifting Instagram sessions by 15 basis points. Looking ahead, the company said it is building foundation models that power both organic content and advertising recommendations, alongside LLM-native recommender systems trained continuously on recommendation data. The company also launched Meta One, a subscription offering that provides additional AI features and tools across its apps, with more pricing tiers planned. Doubling down on AI infrastructure spending: Meta said it will continue investing aggressively in infrastructure as AI adoption accelerates across its consumer and enterprise products. Zuckerberg said a significant share of the company's compute capacity will support model training, its core business, personal agents and enterprise offerings, alongside APIs, business agents and coding tools. During the quarter, Meta announced a strategic venture with BlackRock to develop a 1GW data centre in Texas. The company also raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $130 billion and $145 billion. Chief financial officer Susan Li said the AI industry remains capacity constrained and Meta expects demand for compute to remain high. Separately, Nikkei Asia reported that Meta carries around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet obligations compared with $140 billion of debt recorded on its balance sheet, making it one of the largest hidden AI infrastructure commitments among major technology companies.

Mark Zuckerberg takes aim at rivals, says AI should not be tightly controlled

While he did not directly name OpenAI or Anthropic, his remarks were widely seen as a response to their focus on AI safety and tighter controls. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has criticised the approach taken by some of the biggest AI companies and said advanced AI should not be controlled by a small group of organisations. In an interview with The New York Times, Zuckerberg argued that tightly controlled AI development would slow innovation and go against the values that have shaped the American technology industry. While he did not directly name OpenAI or Anthropic, his remarks were widely seen as a response to their focus on AI safety and tighter controls. Zuckerberg said AI should be available to more people instead of being kept in the hands of a few companies or institutions. His comments come as the debate over the future of AI continues to divide the tech industry. Some companies believe powerful AI systems should be developed carefully with strict safeguards. Others argue that wider access to AI will lead to faster progress and more innovation. Also read: Over 1,100 OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and other AI employees call for AI slowdown, cite real risk "So much of the discourse from a lot of the other labs that are developing this is overwhelmingly filled with doom," Zuckerberg said in the interview, as reported by ANI. "There needs to be a voice or several voices that are bringing realism to this debate." Zuckerberg also questioned the idea that a single, highly controlled AI system could safely serve everyone. He said people have different beliefs and needs, so one AI model should not decide what is best for everyone. "I think a lot of people have this notion that if you build some kind of singular AI you can, through some idealised form of alignment, make sure it is benevolent to humanity," Zuckerberg said. "I'm personally skeptical of that path." Also read: OpenAI's rogue AI agent attacked another tech company before Hugging Face hack: Report The interview comes shortly after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post explaining the company's focus on AI safety. He said Anthropic wants to prevent powerful AI chips from reaching authoritarian governments, stop industrial-scale AI distillation, and require safety testing for highly capable AI models. "I don't know if the goal is to have everyone agree on everything," he said. "Almost by definition, if you believe what I do, you don't need to convince everyone of everything." He added, "I believe the general arc of the industry has been toward more openness and putting the power of tech into more people's hands, not fewer."