Mark Zuckerberg has brilliantly cornered us
Mark Zuckerberg is going all in on AI.
Mark Zuckerberg looks poised to dominate the AI adoption race thanks to a technicality: Meta has three billion-plus captive users who have no choice but to use it.
The billionaire has spent more than 20 years building his Harvard dorm project into a globe-spanning social media empire. He now looks set to make Meta a clear frontrunner in the race to make AI a part of consumers’ lives by simply cornering them into using it.
As the company reported second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Zuckerberg gloated about Meta AI — its AI assistant rolled out earlier this year — being “on track to achieve our goal of becoming the most used AI assistant by the end of the year.”
There’s good reason Zuckerberg is sounding so confident about that.
Meta reported having 3.27 billion daily active users across all of its platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads — for the second quarter of 2024, giving it a user base that no one else can rival.
It’s also a user base that has remained close to Meta’s family of apps over the years. The company’s daily active users grew 7% year-on-year in June, while Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram users continue to sink more than 16 hours of screentime into the apps each month.
In effect, then, that gives Zuckerberg a lot of engaged users to introduce AI-powered technology to. But instead of giving users a choice, Meta is implementing a strategy that provides users with no option to opt-out of using its AI.
This puts it in a unique place to roll out new AI features, the same way it rolled out the Facebook Wall in 2004 and had users adopt it. In contrast, users of competitors like OpenAI or Anthropic have to learn about the product and seek it out.
This hasn’t been lost on analysts. After earnings, Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at Forrester, said, “It’s a smart move by the company to, effectively, introduce Meta AI to its users by forcing them to use it.”
“While Meta boasts about Meta AI being on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world, users of Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp can’t not use it as it’s literally the search bar on those apps,” he said.
Meta’s family of apps now has 3.27 billion daily active users.
There are probably a few reasons Zuckerberg is taking this approach.
For one, Meta is spending billions of dollars on AI, so leaving adoption in the hands of users who might not be sure if the tech is something they need in their lives could make all its investment a waste.
As Meta CFO Susan Li noted on Wednesday’s earnings call, the company’s full-year capital expenditures by the end of 2024 are forecast to be between $37 billion and $40 billion, with “significant capex growth” expected in 2025 to support AI research and product development.
Zuckerberg also seems intent on showing users that AI can inherently make their experience of his apps vastly better.
The CEO said on the call that the technology is improving the quality of recommendations and driving engagement on Facebook and Instagram. He said AI will soon be used to provide better-targeted advertising services, too.
“In the coming years, AI will be able to generate creative for advertisers as well and will also be able to personalize it as people see it,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta’s boss has criticized others for adopting this cornering approach before. He recently he took aim at Apple for keeping users locked into its ecosystem.
Apple will roll out Apple Intelligence to its users later this year via a software update that will bring AI into the lives of users with compatible devices. However, it is giving users the option to opt in to a ChatGPT service introduced as part of a deal it announced with OpenAI in June.
Meta’s users won’t have that luxury, which means AI will become a familiar feature in their lives — whether they like it or not.
