Mark Zuckerberg On The Future of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Meta AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just shared Meta's third quarter earnings report this afternoon (Wednesday 29th October, 2025). The company reported revenue of US $51.24 billion, beating Wall Street's estimates of US $49.5 billion. Earnings per share of the social media giant and AI hyperscaler, however, came in at US $6.03, compared to estimates for US $6.72. The stock fell more than 9% in after-hours trading.

In a Facebook post shortly after the earnings call, Zuckerberg said, “We're very focused on building personal superintelligence for everyone, and delivering the app experiences and computing devices that will improve the lives of billions of people around the world.” 

Below is the transcript of what Zuckerberg said on the call:

“We had another strong quarter -- with 3.5 billion people using at least one of our apps every day. Instagram hit a major milestone with 3 billion monthly actives. We're seeing good momentum across our other apps as well, including Threads which recently passed 150 million daily actives and remains on track to become the leader in its category.

I'm very focused on establishing Meta as the leading frontier AI lab -- building personal superintelligence for everyone, and delivering the app experiences and computing devices that will improve the lives of billions of people around the world. Our approach of advancing open source AI means that when Meta innovates, everyone benefits. 

Meta Superintelligence Labs is off to a strong start. I think we have already built the lab with the highest talent density in the industry. We're heads down developing our next generation of models and products, and I'm looking forward to sharing more on that front over the coming months. We're also building what we expect to be an industry-leading amount of compute. 

Now there's a range of timelines for when people think we're going to get superintelligence. Some think we'll get there in a few years, others think it'll be 5 years, 7 years, or longer. I think it's the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity so that way we're prepared for the most optimistic cases. That way, if superintelligence arrives sooner, we'll be ideally positioned for a generational paradigm shift and many large opportunities. If it takes longer, then we'll use the extra compute to accelerate our core business -- which continues to be able to profitably use much more compute than we've been able to throw at it. And we're seeing very high demand for additional compute both internally and externally. And in the worst case, we would just slow building new infrastructure for some period while we grow into what we've built.

The upside is extremely high both for our existing apps and new products and businesses that are becoming possible to build.

Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, our AI recommendation systems are delivering higher quality and more relevant content, which led to 5% more time spent on Facebook in Q3 and 10% on Threads. Video is a particular bright spot, with video time spent on Instagram up more than 30% since last year. As video continues to grow across our apps, Reels now has an annual run rate of over $50 billion.

Improvements in our recommendation systems will also become even more leveraged as the volume of AI-created content grows. Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we're going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those. Recommendation systems that understand all of this content more deeply and can show you the right content to help you achieve your goals are going to be increasingly valuable.

Our ads business continues to perform very well, largely due to improvements in our AI ranking systems as well. This quarter, we saw meaningful advances from unifying different models into simpler, more general models -- which drive both better performance and efficiency. And now the annual run-rate going through our completely end-to-end AI-powered ads tools has passed $60 billion.

One way that I think about our company overall is that there are three giant transformers that run Facebook, Instagram, and ads recommendations. We have a very strong pipeline of lots of ways to improve these models by incorporating new AI advances and capabilities. At the same time, we're also working on combining these three major AI systems into a single unified AI system that will effectively run our family of apps and business -- using increasing intelligence to improve the trillions of recommendations that it will make for people every day.

I'm also very excited about the new products that we're going to be able to build.

More than a billion monthly actives already use Meta AI, and we see usage increase as we improve our underlying models. I'm very excited to get a frontier model into Meta AI and I think the opportunity there is very large.

The same goes for our Business AI. Every day, people have more than 1 billion active threads with business accounts across our messaging platforms -- ranging from product questions to customer support messages. Our Business AIs will enable tens of millions of businesses to scale these conversations and improve their sales at low cost. The better our models get, the better this is going to work for businesses.

This quarter we also launched Vibes, which is the next generation of our AI creation tools and content experiences. Retention is looking good so far and its usage keeps growing quite quickly week over week. I'm looking forward to ramping up the growth of Vibes over the coming months.

More broadly, I think that Vibes is an example of a new content type enabled by AI, and I think there are more opportunities to build many more novel types of content ahead as well. As our new models become ready, I'm looking forward to starting to show everyone some of the new kinds of products we're working on.

At Connect, we announced our 2025 line of AI glasses, and the response so far has been great. The new Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Oakley Meta Vanguards are both selling well as people love the improved battery life, camera resolution, new AI capabilities, and the great design. And then there's our new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses -- our first glasses with a high-resolution display and the Meta Neural Band to interact with them. They sold out in almost every store within 48 hours, with demo slots fully booked through the end of next month. So we're going to have to invest in increasing manufacturing and selling more of those. This is an area where we're clearly leading and have a huge opportunity ahead. 

Taking a step back, if we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead for our existing apps and the new experiences that are possible, then I think that the next few years will be the most exciting period in our history.

We've got a lot to do. But we're making real progress, delivering strong business results, building the talent density and infrastructure needed for the next era, and leading the way on AI devices that will define the next computing platform. I'm proud of how our teams are rising to the challenge, and I'm grateful for their dedication, hard work, and creativity. As always, thank you all for being part of this journey with us.”

Heading into the 4:30 PM ET call with analysts, Wall Street was eager to hear more on its plans for capex and how it will monetize AI. Meta recently invested US $14 billion in Scale AI with the goal of reaching AI’s coveted “superintelligence.” The company is on track to spend upwards of US $70 billion on AI projects this year.

More on this as it becomes available. 

[Source: Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook]