Facebook reaches record 2 billion active users

Even though Facebook’s social network growth has slowed in recent years, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still the biggest in the market. For the first time in Meta’s (formerly Facebook) history, its main social network has surpassed 2 billion daily active users. This figure was reached in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Despite Facebook’s growth, Meta company is shrinking

Although Facebook is growing, adding 16 million active users in a single quarter, mostly in Asia, and revenue for the period is ahead of expectations, Meta saw a decline in revenue in 2022. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s response to investors, however, was that 2023 will be a year of “efficiency” at the company.

“We will be more proactive in cutting projects that are not performing well, or that are no longer important.”, Zuckerberg said.

It looks like one area he’ll be investing in, rather than cutting budgets, will be generative AI. Last year, AI solutions such as DALL-E 2.0, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion flooded the internet with text-generated images, and towards the end of the year, ChatGPT demonstrated that text-based AI could lead to changes in many industries on the online menu.

“Generative AI is an extremely exciting new area with many different use cases. One of my goals for meta is to build on our research to become a leader in generative AI.”, says the CEO.

It still seems that Reality Labs, the VR, AR and metaverse development division of the company, is losing the most money. That division lost $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, for a total of about $14 billion for the full year. Zuckerberg didn’t try to hide this, saying he expects losses to continue for this division into 2023, but that he’s focused on the technological advancement these investments will provide in the future.