Meta is being critized very hard on the huge capex and for a valid reason, the past faillure with the metaverse. But people forger that zuck is very very good at copying other stuff and making money out of them.
Ai is a valid technology that we all know about and know how useful it can be for some purposes.
So i will explain how the Ai is helping meta and what is the broad version:
1. Ad targeting enchanted by Ai - Before Ai when you doom scroll on instagraml reels that ads and content was based on Cpu algorithim that had few rules like age, location, what u liked and so on, that way it targeted Ads and content for you. Now there are GPU clusters that can really profile you and your content via models that look on what you watch, understand the content, understand what kind of ads will be more suitable for you based on the content and context. So Meta needs these clusters and also would preferable need it's own models so it cut the middle man. We are not talking about a crazy model like mythos but half decent model.
2. Whatsapp/instagram/facebook agents - i think the most important thing will be the agents for whatsapp. Whatsapp has huge huge huge user base outside of the US, people use it as the main messaging app and also talk to business there. Zuck need to make half decent model to help business make strong agents so they can sell more and do customer services all at optimized cost. From the start of there was a spike of users in whatsapp business ai apis and ai tools, at the moment it is pretty much free but it will be monetized heavily soon. So there is a also a real valid reason to invest there in clusters and models.
These i think are the main things that will contribute to monetize ai, but zuck is speaking about personal agents too that will be supported by commerce and premuim versions, i dont think it will be close or better then gpt and antrophic but they just have a huge user base that they can try to roll it and see if it sticks or not. the other thing is meta glassess that i think are a good product for those who like it but i do not see it as a growth engine or something.
So overall yes the spend is huge now but in the years to come there will be massive optimizations at cost of the hardware costs and power ratio that will make meta free cash flow higher and opearting margins higher.