Meta Platforms revenue for Q1 was $42.3 billion, up 16 percent year-over-year and besting Wall Street estimates of $41.3 billion. Profits were up 35 percent to $16.6 billion, hurtling past analyst estimates of $13.6 billion. Advertising, up nearly 15 percent for the quarter compared to last year, comfortably passed $41 billion, driving the revenue performance. Meta began Q2 by launching its anticipated standalone Meta AI app. Built with natively multimodal Llama 4 models, the company is positioning the Meta AI app as “a personal AI designed around voice conversations,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“AI is transforming everything we do,” Zuckerberg said on the earnings call, declaring “there are now almost a billion monthly actives using Meta AI” globally, across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

Listing Meta AI as fourth among five “opportunities” he is prioritizing this year (behind advertising, engagement and business messaging, and before AI devices), Zuckerberg described a vision of making it “an AI that we talk to throughout the day —  while we’re browsing content on our phones, and eventually as we’re going through our days with glasses,” a transition he believes will mark “one of the most important and valuable services that has ever been created.”

“The biggest new idea in the Meta AI app is its Discover feed, which adds an AI twist to social media,” writes The Verge, explaining that it shows “a feed of interactions with Meta AI that other people, including your friends on Instagram and Facebook, have opted to share on a prompt-by-prompt basis.”

Users are able to “like, comment on, share, or remix these shared AI posts” into their own, the idea being “to demystify AI and show ‘people what they can do with it,’ Meta’s VP of product, Connor Hayes, tells [The Verge].”

While Meta boosted headroom in capex spending (from a prior projection of $65 billion to up to possibly as high as $72 billion for the year, per the CFO comments that end the quarterly earnings statement), executives were careful to point out most of that would be “going towards supporting the core business,” meaning increasing compute power to apply AI to ads “rather than generative AI development,” explains Reuters.

“The pace of progress across the industry and the opportunities ahead for us are staggering,” Zuckerberg told analysts on the call. The New York Times reports that “Zuckerberg’s optimism contrasted with comments made by executives at other companies in recent weeks” expressing concern about tariffs. But, NYT notes Zuckerberg’s “remarks carry weight as Meta is often regarded as a bellwether for the tech industry, especially in online advertising.”

Related:
Meta Forecasted It Would Make $1.4T in Revenue from Generative AI by 2035, TechCrunch, 4/30/25
Meta Launches Standalone AI App to Compete with ChatGPT, Bloomberg, 4/29/25
Meta’s Reality Labs Posts $4.2 Billion Loss in First Quarter, CNBC, 4/30/25