[froidpink]

Meta's profit has increased almost 2x since 2023. Meta makes money from advertisers spending money on Meta. So the profit growth from Meta does very much come from the real economy

[bee_rider]

It comes from the real economy in the sense that it is money they could be spent on something productive, but was instead wasted on ads.

[piva00]

In a video I watched recently there was a breakdown of how much a plumbing company had to spend on "marketing" (aka: Google ads placement, Facebook/Instagram) to attract customers and their per-click pay was about 60 USD, they were spending around 16-18k USD per month on online ads to keep the business afloat.

I had no idea that physical small businesses like that needed to spend so much on marketing just to be found.

[msgodel]

Sales are the most important thing in business. Everything else only matters insofar as it drives sales.

[cm2012]

Ads are a necessary matching method in capitalism, there is no better alternative unfortunately.

[blitzar]

Right around the time Meta stopped setting 100's of billions a year of cash on fire in the metaverse and pivoted to Ai.

[dragontamer]

I thought Meta put a total of maybe 30Billion in Metaverse?

A lot of wasted money but not 100B++

[cedws]

Reality Labs is still a thing, they’re still working on VR/MR.

[philipallstar]

To open-sourcing AI models though, no?

[RC_ITR]

Meta is also a great example of AI leading to higher user engagement today.

Reels isn't powered by Transformers per se (likely more of a complex mix of ML techniques), but it is powered by honest-to-goodness SOTA AI/ML running on leading-edge Nvidia GPUs.

I think, because they're so impressive, people assume Transformers = AI/ML, when there's plenty of other hyperscale AI/ML products on the market today.

[arethuza]

What if a lot of that advertising is from AI companies that are likely to fail in any downturn - didn't advertising drop fairly sharply during at the end of the dot-com bubble?