Meta Platforms, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the META fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, again, press star one. And we ask that you limit yourself to one question. And this call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Kenneth Dorrell, Meta's Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Meta Platform's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Susan Lee, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investor.atmeta.com. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Mark.

All right. Thanks, Ken. Thanks, everyone, for joining today. We ended 2024 on a strong note with now more than 3.3 billion people using at least one of our apps each day. This is going to be a really big year. I know it always feels like every year is a big year, but more than usual, it feels like the trajectory for most of our long-term initiatives is going to be a lot clearer by the end of this year. So I keep telling our teams that this is going to be intense because we have about 48 weeks to get on the trajectory that we want to be on. In AI, I expect that this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people. And I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant. Meta AI is already used by more people than any other assistant. Once a service reaches that scale, it usually develops a durable long-term advantage. 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. I don't think that there's just going to be one big AI that everyone uses that does the same thing. People are going to get to choose how their AI works and what it looks like for them. I continue to think that this is going to be one of the most transformative products that we've made. And we have some fun surprises that I think people are going to like this year. I think this will very well be the year when Lama and open source become the most advanced and widely used AI models as well. Lama 4 is making great progress in training. Lama 4 mini is done with pre-training and our reasoning models and larger model are looking good too. Our goal with Lama 3 was to make open source competitive with closed models. And our goal for Lama 4 is to lead. Lama4 will be natively multimodal. It's an omni model and it will have agentic capabilities. So it's going to be novel and it's going to unlock a lot of new use cases. And I'm looking forward to sharing more of our plan for the year on that over the next couple of months. I also expect that 2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent that will has coding and problem-solving abilities of around a good mid-level engineer. This is going to be a profound milestone and potentially one of the most important innovations in history, as well as over time, potentially a very large market. Whichever company builds this first, I think is going to have a meaningful advantage in deploying it to advance their AI research and shape the field. That's another reason why I think that this year is going to set the course for the future. Our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are a real hit, and this will be the year when we understand the trajectory for AI glasses as a category. Many breakout products And the history of consumer electronics have sold five to 10 million units in their third generation. This will be a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of glasses and glasses being the next computing platform like we've been talking about for some time, or if this is just going to be a longer grind. But it's great overall to see people recognizing that these glasses are the perfect form factor for AI, as well as just great stylish glasses. These are all big investments. especially the hundreds of billions of dollars that we will invest in AI infrastructure over the long term. I announced last week that we expect to bring online almost a gigawatt of capacity this year, and we're building a two gigawatt and potentially bigger AI data center that is so big that it'll cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there. We're planning to fund all of this by at the same time investing aggressively in initiatives that use these AI advances to increase revenue growth. And we've put together a plan that will hopefully accelerate the pace of these initiatives over the next few years. That's what a lot of our new headcount growth is going towards. And how well we execute on this will also determine our financial trajectory over the next few years. There are a number of other important product trends related to our family of apps that I think we're going to know more about this year as well. We're going to learn what's going to happen with TikTok. And regardless of that, I expect reels on Instagram and Facebook to continue growing. I expect threads to continue on its trajectory to become the leading discussion platform and eventually reach a billion people over the next several years. Threads now has more than 320 million monthly actives and has been adding more than 1 million signups per day. I expect WhatsApp to continue gaining share and making progress towards becoming the leading messaging platform in the U.S. like it is in a lot of the rest of the world. WhatsApp now has more than 100 million monthly actives in the U.S. Facebook is used by more than 3 billion people. monthly actives. And we're focused on growing its cultural influence. And I'm excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook. All right. So this is also going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse. The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been steadily growing. And this is a year when a number of the long-term investments that we've been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. So I think we're gonna know a lot more about Horizon's trajectory by the end of this year. This is also going to be a big year for redefining our relationship with governments. We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning. And that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock. So this is going to be a big year. I think that this is the most exciting and dynamic that I have ever seen our industry. Between AI, glasses, massive infrastructure projects, doing a bunch of work to try to accelerate our business and building the future of social media, we have a lot to do. And I think we're going to build some awesome things that... shape the future of human connection. As always, I am grateful for everyone who's on this journey with us. Thank you, and here's Susan.