How Meta plans to recoup its billions in AI investment

The year ahead for Meta is all about AI. But the year after that will be all about monetizing it.

The company is currently training Llama 4, the next iteration of its large language model, which it expects to release this year. Even though Llama is a free, open-source product, it sits right at the center of Meta’s plans for growth.

Unlike its competitors in the AI horserace, like OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta can pour tens of billions of profits from its other businesses into this effort (and the infrastructure needed to run it), and has lots of ways that it can turn the free product into a revenue firehose.

On yesterday’s Q4 earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:

“We have a really exciting roadmap for this year with a unique vision focused on personalization. We believe that people don’t all want to use the same AI — people want their AI to be personalized to their context, their interests, their personality, their culture, and how they think about the world.”

Anytime you hear the word “personalization” in a Big Tech product, that means it will be used for ads. None of the big AI players have integrated ads into their chatbot products, but if anyone is prepared for this, it’s Meta.

Meta is an advertising company, after all. For all of FY 2024, the company pulled in over $160 billion in ad revenue, growing 21% year over year.

Zuckerberg regularly says that Meta’s pattern is to grow a product to 1 billion users, then monetize:

“We try to scale them to reach usually a billion people or more. And it’s at that point once they’re at scale that we really start focusing on monetization. So sometimes we’ll experiment with monetization before — we’re running some experiments with Threads now for example.”

But Zuckerberg cautioned that the “actual business opportunity for Meta AI and AI Studio and business agents and people interacting with these AIs” won’t show up until after 2025.

And if Meta’s plans for monetizing AI look anything like its current ad business, you might not even have to use Meta’s chatbot to help fuel the new business.

The Meta tracking “pixel” has turned billions of internet users into targets for Meta advertising, even if they aren’t users of Meta platforms. The Meta pixel has become such a built-in default on billions of websites that it has caused sensitive data collection from suicide hotlines, hospitals, tax-filing companies, and federal student loan providers. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed due to the ad technology’s misuse.

Nobody really knows exactly how the “personalization” of AI services will be monetized, but after spending hundreds of billions to build all this fancy, city-sized AI infrastructure, you better believe they will want a return on their investment.