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Nearly a decade after announcing grand plans for 30-minute drone delivery of items up to 5 pounds, Amazon told CNBC it’s now completed just 100 deliveries in two small U.S. markets.

Compare that number with internal projections from January for 10,000 deliveries by the end of this year, according to a video address in early 2023. Days after Amazon set its target, a significant number of Prime Air workers were let go as part of the largest round of layoffs in company history. 

Now, Amazon’s 2023 goals have changed, the company said, pointing to regulatory hurdles put in place by the Federal Aviation Administration.

“While the FAA broadened Prime Air’s authority to conduct drone deliveries to include sites in California and Texas, the phased process for expanding our service areas is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Av Zammit, an Amazon spokesperson.

CNBC went to Lockeford, California, a 4,000-person town and one of the two U.S. markets where the company’s drone program is operating. Amazon said it started drone deliveries there in December, but there was no apparent aerial activity at the former concrete manufacturing warehouse that now serves as the unit’s local hub.

“I would love to see the drones flying around. I can’t wait,” said Ken Thomas, who co-owns a nearby deli that’s served lunch to some Amazon employees. “I haven’t seen any yet.”

Thomas added, “One guy said they had 14 customers signed up, which seems kind of low to me.”

Amazon said thousands of people “have expressed interest” in the program and that the company is “working with each one of them to make this a reality.”

Company employees previously told CNBC that the drones are only delivering to two homes in Lockeford, located next door to each other less than a mile from the warehouse. The employees asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

Main Street of Lockeford, California, on April 14, 2023. The 4,000-person town is one of two small markets where Amazon started gradual drone deliveries in December 2022.

Katie Tarasov

But where Amazon has stalled, other companies’ drone programs have seen greater traction, particularly those that started outside of the regulatory confines of the U.S.

CNBC visited Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, at a drone test facility in Hollister, California. At one point, there were 37 drones in the air at once making demo deliveries.

Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said it’s made 330,000 deliveries. While thousands of those have been for partners such as Walgreens in Virginia and Texas, the company primarily delivers in Australia, where it brings orders from DoorDash and the supermarket Coles to homes in more than 50 suburbs. 

“The service area that we cover there is between 70,000 and 100,000 people and it’s a relatively sort of geographically constrained location,” Woodworth said. “If you look at metrics from last year, we were seeing on the order of about 1,000-plus deliveries a day to that sort of one snapshot of the planet.”

Wing CEO Adam Woodworth shows the Alphabet company’s delivery drone to CNBC’s Katie Tarasov on April 25, 2023, in Hollister, California.

Andrew Evers

CNBC also got a glimpse of Walmart drone deliveries in its home state of Arkansas, with partner Zipline, which recently announced its fixed-wing aircraft has made 600,000 commercial deliveries, largely of medical supplies in Africa. In March, Zipline unveiled a far different model that lowers a “droid” to the ground by a tether.

A growing list of companies, including Sweetgreen and nutrition retailer GNC, have signed up to deliver with the new drone when it’s scheduled to come online in 2024.

“We operate in three states: North Carolina, Arkansas and Utah,” said Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. “For some of the families in those states that we serve day in and day out, not only is drone delivery a thing, not only is it possible, it’s also now boring.”

Brandey Oliver, a Zipline customer in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, said she likes the services because they’re secure.

“If we’re not here and we get a delivery, nobody has access to our backyard,” said Oliver, who lives about 10 miles from Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville. “It really helps in emissions, and global warming has me worried. So I like it that no delivery cars are used.”

DroneUp is another Walmart partner with financial backing from the retailer. CEO Tom Walker said its drones have made more than 110,000 deliveries in the U.S. DroneUp cut some jobs this week, in a shift to focus more on consumer delivery and away from enterprise services such as construction and real estate monitoring.

“We have 34 locations operating in six states today, and we’re delivering in less than 30 minutes,” Walker said. “The routes are designed to minimize flight over people, minimize flight over moving vehicles, and it chooses the optimum route both from a safety standpoint, but from an efficiency standpoint.”

Walmart said it made more than 6,000 drone deliveries across seven states in 2022 with DroneUp, Zipline and a third partner, Flytrex.

‘Most complex airspace in the world’

Reese Mozer has been in the drone industry for 14 years and remembers when Amazon’s then-CEO Jeff Bezos first announced Prime Air drone delivery on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in December 2013. 

“Those of us who were in the industry at that time could foresee many of the challenges that were coming to actually fulfill that vision,” said Mozer, now president of Ondas Holdings, which owns several drone companies such as Airobotics. “You know, delivering packages via drone is a very complicated problem because what we’re talking about is theoretically thousands of autonomous drones carrying packages over people’s heads, avoiding structures, avoiding other air traffic. And this is a particularly difficult problem in the United States because we have the busiest and most complex airspace in the world.”

In 2020, Amazon brought in former Boeing executive David Carbon to lead Prime Air. He announced the program’s first official deliveries on LinkedIn on Christmas Eve 2022. 

“It’s actually not that hard to deliver a package via drone,” Carbon said at an Amazon event in November. “It’s a very different problem space to design, build, certify and operate an autonomous safety-critical system that can operate over densely populated environments within the national airspace.”

Safety, Amazon said, remains its top priority. There have been multiple crashes at Amazon’s test site in Pendleton, Oregon, including one in 2021 that sparked a 20-acre brush fire. In a statement, Amazon said that Pendleton is “a closed testing facility where the intent is to learn the limits of our technology” and that it’s “never had an incident during an actual customer delivery flight.”

Amazon’s drone design has evolved significantly over the years. It started as a vertical lifting “octocopter” with eight exposed rotors, and then moved to a design with four large enclosed rotors. Then came a version that could take off vertically and fly forward like a plane.

The latest design was first unveiled in 2019. It’s now on its second iteration: the MK27-2, which is about 5.5 feet wide and weighs about 80 pounds. In an interview in November, Prime Air’s Calsee Hendrickson, who leads product and program management, said the technology onboard for safety features is what makes the MK27-2 bigger.

“If the drone encounters another aircraft when it’s flying, it’ll fly around that other aircraft,” Hendrickson said. “If when it gets to its delivery location, your dog runs underneath the drone, we won’t deliver the package.”

Amazon’s VP of Prime Air David Carbon showcased the current MK27-2 drone in Westborough, Massachusetts, on Nov. 10, 2022.

Erin Black

The FAA takes these types of safety features into consideration when companies such as Amazon apply for Part 135 air carrier certification, which allows drones to make commercial deliveries. Only five drone operators have been granted such certification: Wing and UPS in 2019, Amazon in 2020, Zipline in 2022, and Flytrex partner Causey Aviation Unmanned in 2023.

But there are multiple levels of Part 135 clearance. Prime Air drones, along with most other delivery drones, operate with a number of federal exemptions that greatly restrict where and how they can fly. For example, most delivery drones have to avoid active roadways and people. The FAA also greatly limits operations of drones beyond the visual line of sight of an observer. Beyond visual line of sight, or BVLOS, while meant to ensure a human can steer away from other aircraft that could cause a crash, is also perhaps the biggest current obstacle to drone delivery scalability.

When asked how many of Wing’s resources were going toward BVLOS, Woodworth said, “I would say all, right?” He added, “Otherwise, what’s the point of using an airplane?”

Introduced in February, the Increasing Competitiveness for American Drones Act of 2023 would streamline the BVLOS approvals process. For now, the restriction often means drones can fly only one or two miles from the takeoff spot and require extra people to watch each flight.

“That person is getting paid to stand there, watch that drone, and that all factors into the cost,” said Jeremiah Karpowicz, editorial director of Commercial UAV News. “Very quickly you see that’s not going to make sense.”

One way to get FAA clearance for BVLOS is with a “detect and avoid” system, or what Amazon calls sense-and-avoid. The idea is to identify moving objects such as other aircraft, people and pets, and static objects such as a chimney or a clothesline, and automatically steer clear of them. These systems often use cameras, which make it tough to operate in cloudy conditions or at night.

Zipline uses microphones to listen for and automatically avoid other aircraft. The FAA recently certified Zipline’s detect and avoid system so its drones can fly beyond visual line of sight and over populated areas.

“Zipline achieved 40 million commercial autonomous miles with zero human safety incidents before we sought certification in the U.S.,” Rinaudo Cliffton said.

In late 2021, Amazon wrote to the FAA about the safety features on the MK27-2 in hopes the regulator would remove some restrictions. But a year later, the FAA declined Amazon’s request, saying the company didn’t provide sufficient data to show the MK27-2 could operate safely over people, roads or structures.

Amazon moved forward anyway, though gradually, in Lockeford and in College Station, Texas. Amazon said the two markets were chosen because of their demographics and topography. 

“The FAA cares about two things,” Mozer said. “They care about you colliding with another aircraft and they care about you hurting someone on the ground. So if you are in a less populated area, that means there’s less people on the ground, less chance for injury. And there’s also probably just less air traffic.”

‘Horses are skittish’

Aside from clearing FAA hurdles, public acceptance remains a big obstacle facing the whole industry.

“The biggest public pushback is: What is that drone doing? It’s probably spying on me,” said Karpowicz.

In Lockeford, Thomas said that fear could cause problems.

“I did think some people might try to shoot it down,” he said.

All the drone companies we interviewed said their cameras don’t record or, if they do, the video isn’t made available to operators.

“The cameras on our aircraft are just for navigation,” said Wing’s Woodworth. “They just look straight down. They can’t move around and there’s no feedback to the operators, so they’re just used to help the plane figure out where it is.”

Some residents also worry the noise of drones will change the quiet rural feel of Lockeford.

“There’s a field with cows in it, and that’s just down the street from the Amazon warehouse,” Thomas said. “I don’t know if the cows will be bothered by the drones or not. Horses might be, though. Horses are skittish.”

Prime Air drones are not expected to exceed 58 decibels, according to an FAA assessment, about the noise level of an outdoor air conditioning unit. Woodworth said Wing’s drones stay under 55 decibels at cruising altitude. Zipline said its coming P2 model is even quieter.

“People completely hate the way that quadcopters and octocopters sound,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “It’s super annoying. It sounds like an angry swarm of bees and there is zero chance that communities are going to accept that kind of an experience scaling up and becoming something that you have to listen to multiple times a day.”

For some companies, weather remains another hindrance to reliable delivery. DroneUp had to cancel flights due to wind on the day we visited the company in Arkansas. Earlier that morning, Zipline made two deliveries.

A drone operator loads a Walmart package into Zipline’s P1 fixed-wing drone for delivery to a customer home in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 30, 2023.

Bunee Tomlinson

“We fly in really crazy rain storms, lightning storms, dust storms,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “We fly in wind that is so strong that sometimes the aircraft is actually moving backwards relative to the ground. That is a gigantic engineering challenge. It’s taken us seven years of hardening every part of the system.”

Wing said its drones can operate in sustained winds above 20 knots and moderate rain. Amazon said the MK27-2 flies in clear, dry weather and can handle sustained winds up to 14 knots. 

Now Amazon is working on its next model, the MK30, meant to better handle high temperatures and rain and to fly further. It’s also supposed to be lighter, smaller and half as loud.

But user demand remains the big question.

“I’m still trying to figure out what exactly the benefit or the perk of the drone program would be,” said Audrey Tankersley, who was having lunch in Lockeford at Thomas’ deli the day of our visit.

Customers in Lockeford and College Station told CNBC that Amazon incentivizes them to order drone deliveries by offering them gift cards. Amazon said it was consumer demand that drove the program from the start.

“They’re excited about this,” Hendrickson said. “And that’s what Amazon does: We listen to our customers and then we work backwards to design the most efficient service that we can.”

It’s a challenging time for the market, as regulation and a slowing economy forced some downsizing and delayed plans. But those on the inside remain optimistic.

“I wish everybody else in the space the best luck,” Woodworth said. “Because I want the space to exist.”

Watch the video to learn more about how Amazon fell behind in drone delivery: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/05/17/at-100-deliveries-amazon-drones-fall-far-behind-google-and-walmart.html

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Google investors have big expectations after stock’s sharpest quarterly rally in 20 years

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October 28, 2025

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Google investors have big expectations after stock’s sharpest quarterly rally in 20 years

Google CEO Sundar Pichai waves as he arrives to attend the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, February 11, 2025.

Benoit Tessier | Reuters

Alphabet has a high bar to clear when it reports earnings Wednesday.

The company’s stock price soared 38% in the third quarter, its best quarterly performance in two decades. It’s continued to rally, climbing 11% so far in October, closing at a record on Monday.

With revenue growth stuck in the low teens of late, and expected to come in at 12% next year, investors have recalibrated their expectations after witnessing speedier growth in the years before the 2022 slowdown. Much of the recent optimism centers around Google’s improved position in the artificial intelligence race. 

However, the biggest catalyst for the stock in the third quarter had more to do with Google’s relative weakness in AI, compared with its standing in online ads. 

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Alphabet vs. Nasdaq

Alphabet shares soared in early September, when Google avoided the worst-case scenario in its search antitrust case. Following the government’s victory in its case against the company last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in the remedies decision last month that Google would not be forced to sell off its Chrome browser, but must share data with competitors. 

Mehta said that the rise in AI services from companies like OpenAI has created plenty of new competition in search. Backing up his point, OpenAI last week unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered browser that could directly challenge Chrome.

While investors immediately cheered Mehta’s ruling, Google now has to show that it’s a force in AI, which is serving as the growth engine for the tech sector. Google’s cloud unit benefits from the AI boom as companies count on the technology for running large language models and expanding workloads. And Google is heavily investing in Gemini, its family of AI models, products and services. 

Over the weekend, analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets raised their price target on Alphabet to $300 from $265, expecting that third-quarter results will “show that faster product velocity is driving momentum in Search, Cloud and Waymo,” its autonomous vehicle business.

The stock pop, the analysts wrote, is due to “a combination of the DOJ Search remedies trial being more favorable than expected and more signs of progress in AI across business units.”

Alphabet is scheduled to report results after the bell on Wednesday, alongside rivals Microsoft and Meta. Apple and Amazon report the following day. 

Wall Street is expecting to see revenue growth of 13% to $99.89 billion and earnings per share of $2.26, according to LSEG. 

‘The bite isn’t fatal’

When it comes to Google’s position in AI, some analysts see reasons for concern.

Bernstein analysts wrote last month after the remedies decision that Mehta’s comments about generative AI competing with search may be a red flag for investors. 

“The bite isn’t fatal but it still stings,” wrote the analysts, who have the equivalent of a hold rating on Alphabet.

Mehta dedicated roughly 30 pages of the 226-page filing to explaining generative AI and the market as it exists today. He described the space as “highly competitive” and wrote that there have been “numerous new market entrants” with access to “a lot of capital.”

ChatGPT accounts for about 81% of the global AI chatbot market, according to September data from StatCounter. Perplexity is second at 11%, followed by Microsoft Copilot at 4.1% and Gemini at 2.8%, the firm said. 

But Google is aggressively pushing Gemini as far more than just a ChatGPT competitor, and is taking advantage of its strength in various markets for distribution. 

Earlier this month, the company launched Gemini Enterprise, targeting corporate clients with agents that perform specific work tasks. In September, Google announced it was rolling out Gemini in Chrome to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. as well as to mobile devices, allowing users to ask Gemini for help understanding the contents of a particular web page, work across tabs, or do more within a single tab, such as schedule a meeting or search for a YouTube video.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this month at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that Gemini 3, the latest version of the company’s AI model, will be released this year. 

Google has to show it's protecting search this earnings season, says G Squared's Victoria Greene

Analysts at Mizuho said in a report about the internet market last week that “competitive risks from OpenAI across the internet landscape, particularly at Google, have been topic #1” in more than 100 recent conversations with investors. 

Still, they said that they see “competitive fears likely to recede as we refocus on fundamentals with earnings.” For Google, the “imminent roll-out of Gemini 3 could further tilt the sentiment for Alphabet shares toward AI-winner, at least near term,” they wrote. 

Even as the remedies resolution was generally welcomed by investors, the company will have to make some concessions, according to the judge’s ruling. Most notably, Google has to make available certain search data and user data to its “qualified competitors.”

Determining which companies fall into that category will be the job of a technical oversight committee at a date that hasn’t yet been announced. 

Services like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft Bing may be among the beneficiaries, potentially receiving improved access to some of Google’s search index data under specific licensing arrangements. 

Mehta wrote that the data-sharing remedies “can help to close the sizeable advantage Google has in answering long-tail queries, thereby improving product quality and attractiveness to new users.”

Baird analysts wrote that they expect a “modest” impact to Google, because the company doesn’t have to share its data with generative AI competitors like Perplexity and OpenAI. That would have been “more problematic,” the Baird analysts wrote.  

Google, which plans to appeal the ruling, declined to comment, but pointed to an earlier blog post on the judge’s decision. 

“We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely,” the company wrote. 

Abiel Garcia, a former deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, working in antitrust, said he doesn’t see the ruling having an impact on the way Google operates.

“Maybe some of the data will help competitors’ products at the periphery, but I don’t think this is going to really shift anything,” Garcia, who’s now a partner at Kesselman, Brantly & Stockinge, told CNBC. “It almost encourages Google’s roll-the-dice behavior.”

WATCH: Google’s search empire under fire

Google's search empire under fire

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BlackRock-linked tokenization firm Securitize to go public via SPAC deal

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October 28, 2025

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BlackRock-linked tokenization firm Securitize to go public via SPAC deal

Carlos Domingo, chief executive officer of Securitize Inc., speaks during the Messari Mainnet summit in New York, US, on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Securitize, the “real world assets” platform that powers BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, will go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, CEO Carlos Domingo told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

The fintech firm will merge with Cantor Equity Partners II, Inc., a blank-check company sponsored by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald that trades under the CEPT ticker. The deal values Securitize’s business at $1.25 billion in pre-money equity.

“Tokenization is what everybody’s talking about … but there’s nobody publicly traded that does it,” Domingo told CNBC. “We will do well in the public market because people want to index themselves to tokenization the same way that people are buying Circle because they want to index themselves to stablecoins.”

Tokenization refers to the registration of ownership rights to real-world assets such as stocks, bonds or gold on a blockchain. The process enables more transparent and around-the-clock trading versus traditional methods, according to its proponents — among whom are Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

Following the merger, the combined entity Securitize Corp.’s stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SECZ. Shares could begin trading on the exchange as soon as January, according to Domingo. 

The company will book $465 million in gross proceeds from the deal. That includes $225 million from private investors including Borderless Capital and Hanwha Investment, and $240 million in the SPAC’s trust account, assuming no redemptions. 

RWA tokenization takes off

The deal comes as tokenized RWAs boom. The combined market value of tokenized U.S. Treasurys has climbed to roughly $8.6 billion as of writing time, up more than 200% over the past year, according to data provider RWA.xyz.

The RWA tokenization market as a whole has ballooned 135% over the past year and is now worth $35 billion, the data shows. Citi analysts see massive growth for the tokenized RWA market, saying it could grow to almost $4 trillion by 2030.

That positions Securitize — which Domingo says has been profitable in recent quarters — to jump into the fray of firms aiming to capitalize on growing demand for digital assets. Earlier this year, Circle debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, raising about $1.1 billion in its blockbuster IPO. Cryptocurrency exchanges Gemini and Bullish also went public earlier in 2025.

Tapping public markets will create winners and losers as the digital asset space continues to grow and mature, Domingo added.

“The crypto industry needs to consolidate,” he said. “If you’re publicly traded and you have access to stock capital markets as well as cash, you can be on the side that is consolidating and not be consolidated by somebody else.”

‘A better ledger’

Founded in 2017, Securitize has facilitated several large financial firms’ first forays into tokenized funds. 

In March 2024, BlackRock launched its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) on the Ethereum blockchain in partnership with Securitize, enabling qualified investors to digitally hold U.S. Treasurys and earn yield. The firm has also tokenized more than $4 billion in assets through partnerships with Apollo, Hamilton Lane, KKR and VanEck on their tokenized funds. 

Securitize is the largest tokenization platform, dominating 20% of the RWA tokenization market, per RWA.xyz.

The company plans to also digitize its own equity, a move designed to demonstrate how the public company process and trading can move on-chain, Domingo told CNBC. The executive sees a future in which everything is brought on-chain.

“There’s $400 trillion out there of assets that could potentially be tokenized,” Domingo said. “It’s an upgrade … within the next five to 10 years, you will see everything will be on-chain, because it’s just a better ledger.”

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Meta’s AI app has seen growth soar since launch of Vibes, but trails OpenAI’s Sora

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October 28, 2025

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Meta's AI app has seen growth soar since launch of Vibes, but trails OpenAI's Sora

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., wears a pair of Meta Oakley Vanguard AI glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta’s AI app has seen a major jolt in downloads since launching its Vibes feed of AI-generated videos, giving investors a glimpse of the company’s artificial intelligence strategy ahead of Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings.

Since releasing Vibes on Sept. 25, the Meta AI app’s downloads on both iOS and Android are up 56% month-to-month to a total of 3.9 million downloads as of Oct. 18, according to data provided to CNBC by mobile research firm Appfigures.

“That’s what I’d call standout growth,” said Appfigures Head of Insights Randy Nelson, adding that “the month’s not even over.”

Still, OpenAI’s rival Sora app, which launched Sept. 30, appears to have more momentum despite only being available on Apple’s iOS platform and requiring an invitation for use. From Sept. 30 through Oct. 18, Sora saw 2.6 million downloads on iOS, compared to the 1.1 million downloads of the Meta AI app, according to Appfigures.

Sora’s early popularity isn’t surprising to nearly a dozen creators, marketers and brand agencies that spoke with CNBC about about their interest and use of the AI tools.

Meta declined to comment.

We tested OpenAI’s Sora 2 AI-video app to find out why Hollywood is worried

Creators and marketers say they generally find Sora easier to use. Among the key distinctions is Sora’s capability of producing more realistic looking videos that show people talking, while Vibes only lets users choose select songs as accompanying audio.

The Vibes feed is filled with surreal, playful content, ranging from four lions sharing a pizza in the jungle to a hedgehog singing karaoke.

Meta has been paying creators to produce AI-generated videos for Vibes as a way to boost the visibility of the app, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meta has sought out influencers who specialize in generative AI tools provided by the startup Midjourney, and is requiring them to sign non-disclosure agreements, according to the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to comment on the matter.

Meta’s evolving AI strategy

The Facebook parent debuted the Meta AI app in late April, confirming an earlier CNBC report. The app was originally called Meta View and was used by owners of the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to manage their device settings, import photos and perform other utility functions.

The app, which is still used to manage Ray-Ban Meta glasses, was relaunched as Meta AI to serve as the company’s hub for users to interact with the social media firm’s ChatGPT-like AI assistant, but the September launch of Vibes added a video feed component similar to that of TikTok. The key difference is that all of the content found on the Vibes feed has been created entirely by AI generators.

Unlike Sora, which is powered by OpenAI’s proprietary model, Meta AI’s Vibes feature relies on models provided by third parties like Midjourney and Black Forest Labs, according to a Threads post last month from Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer and the former CEO of Scale AI. Meta is also developing its own internal generative AI technology, Wang wrote.

Meta’s reliance on third-party AI models to power Vibes underscores the company’s newfound willingness to seek outside help as it tries to get its AI technology back on track. The underwhelming launch of Llama 4 in April spurred CEO Mark Zuckerberg into spending billions of dollars to shake up Meta’s AI organization and install new leaders like Wang, CNBC previously reported.

That overhaul continued last week, when Meta laid off 600 employees in its AI organization. The company spared Wang’s core TBD Labs group, which now overseas touchstone AI efforts like Llama.

Meta’s AI strategy is sure to be a major topic in the company’s third-quarter earnings report and investor call on Wednesday. For the quarter, analysts expect revenue growth of 22% from a year earlier to $49.4 billion, according to LSEG. Wall Street expects revenue growth for the full year of 19% to $196.2 million.

Meta Vibes

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Some of the influencers that Meta is paying to populate Vibes are based in India, where Sora is not yet available and TikTok is banned. 

Company executives have previously said that Meta AI usage, largely accessed via the company’s WhatsApp service, is the highest India, the world’s most-populous country, even though not all influencers there get paid.

“One of the biggest reasons that got me excited is because I’ve been in the creator ecosystem for almost 15 years now,” said Gaurav Bisen, a creator from India who posts 10 to 15 times a day on Vibes but isn’t paid by Meta. “Creating content on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube takes a lot of time, energy and investment. But here, it’s so easy. You just type a prompt.”

Bisen said he’s found early traction on Vibes, where his following has grown to more than 25,000. He said he’s learned that short, animated dance clips perform best.

“People who didn’t have the confidence to come in front of a camera can now create from their imagination,” Bisen said. “You can produce creative content without even being in it.”

Still, engagement on Vibes remains limited compared to Instagram or TikTok. Most creators told CNBC that their posts average fewer than 10 likes and almost no comments.

Instead, Vibes users measure success through “remixes” – a feature that lets creators take an AI-generated video, edit the prompt and repost it as their own.

“Remixes kind of seem like the currency on the app,” said Dylan McIntyre, who runs the AI video account JunkBoxAI on Instagram, where he has more than 1.3 million followers but just 22,000 on Vibes. “People are liking what they’re seeing and want to make their own and repost it.”

Meta is leaning heavily into generative AI as it courts creators and competes with OpenAI. Its AI Studio tool lets users build customizable AI characters and chat with them across Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Investors will also be listening for commentary on the company’s Metaverse strategy.

Meta confirmed on Monday that Vishal Shah, who spent the past four years leading metaverse initiatives, is now helping run AI products as part of the company’s Superintelligence Labs division, which is led by recent high-profile hires, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Shah, who will now report to Friedman, was previously a vice president of product at Instagram. The Financial Times first reported on Shah’s new position.

WATCH: Partnership with Meta for smart glasses helps lift EssilorLuxottica sales.

Partnership with Meta for smart glasses helps lift EssilorLuxottica sales by 11.7%

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