Q&A（Question-and-Answer Session）is a session after the company's prepared remarks where institutional investors and analysts ask management questions. In this dialogue, you may find some valuable information that might affect the stock price in the following weeks.
Now let's look at some key points from META Q1 2023 Q&A Session Transcript $Meta Platforms(META)$
Q:The one is on generative AI and how you think about generative AI and some of the division models and your large language models potentially impacting your long-term advertising business and finding ways to deliver more value for advertisers over the next two, three, five years? How do you see gen AI impacting advertising?
A:Although there aren't that many details that I'm going to share at this point, more of this will come in focus as we start shipping more of these things over the coming months.But I do think that there's a big opportunity here. You asked specifically about advertisers, but I think it's going to also help create more engaging experiences, which should create more engagement, and that, by itself, creates more opportunities for advertisers. But then I think that there's a bunch of opportunities on the visual side to help advertisers create different creative. We don't have the tools to do that over time, eventually making it.So we've always strived to just have an advertiser just be able to tell us what their objective is and then have us to be able to do as much of the work as possible for them and now being able to do more of the creative work there and ourselves for those who want that, I think, could be a very exciting opportunity.
I also think that there's going to be a very interesting convergence between some of the AI agents in messaging and business messaging, where right now, we see a lot of the places where business messaging is most successful are places where a lot of businesses can afford to basically have people answering a lot of questions for people and engaging with them in chat. And obviously, once you light up the ability for tens of millions of small businesses to have AI agents acting on their behalf, you'll have way more businesses that can afford to have someone engaging in chat with customers. So I think that, that could be a pretty big opportunity, too.So those are just a few of the things that we're looking at. I think this is very broad. Like I said, I think this is literally going to touch every single one of our products and services in multiple ways. So -- and this is just a very big wave and new set of technologies that's available, and we're working on it across the whole company.
Q:Just as we're thinking about hiring expectations for '24 and beyond. I think there's been some ink in the press about potential 1% to 2% hiring going forward. Can you just talk to us about that a little bit? And how does using AI internally factor in your thoughts about long-term hiring?
A:You were asking about the 1% to 2% head count growth stat that's been out there. And I thought it was worth clarifying. So that comes from something Mark mentioned in a recent internal employee Q&A that he had expected company head count to increase only 1% to 2% year-over-year.And I want to clarify that Mark was actually speaking to employees about head count budgets that have already been allocated. What we've also said previously is we have been in a broad-based hiring freeze for the last half year. And as we complete our layoffs in April and May, we will resume hiring, and we would expect head count growth in excess of 1% to 2% in 2024 as a result as we ramp up those recruiting pipelines.
But our long-term focus is very much on efficiency. And as hiring resumes, you'll find the biggest areas that we are hiring in will be to support priority areas like generative AI, ads, infrastructure, Reality Labs, some of the areas that we've been talking about. And you also asked about using AI internally and how that factors into our thoughts on long-term hiring. We certainly don't have enough visibility yet into how AI will make our workforce more productive, but it's something we're excited about. And I think we will have more clarity on that as more tools begin getting developed to enhance employee productivity across the industry.
Q:I think really interesting stat on the Instagram time you gave. But just wondering how you'd characterize the health of the Facebook user base and usage on the site? Obviously, DAUs went up to 68% this quarter. I think Asia was really strong. But what are you seeing there? And is there kind of a catch-up here where the real content could certainly helping Facebook time spend as well as you saw with Instagram. But just stepping out, I think there is an area of that usage could be flat or down. Just wondering what your thoughts there. And what you're seeing on the core Facebook.
A:In terms of core Facebook user growth, we've been pleased with the growth of the community and the engagement trends that we've been seeing. In particular, I think in Q1, DAU growth benefited from strong product execution. But I should also note that Q1 is a seasonally strong engagement quarter for us, so that has some benefit in terms of quarter-over-quarter growth.
You mentioned sort of whether the work in Reels is driving incremental or is driving engagement in Facebook, and what I would say there is that more broadly sort of the discovery engine work for us and the investments we've made ranking on connected content is expansive beyond Instagram, and I think it's certainly a part of what is also driving growth on Facebook as well.
The above Q&A are highlights that are edited for brevity. Click here for the full Meta Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript.
If you want to know more details, you can click here to re-watch the Meta Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call
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