Earnings season is in full swing, and Big Tech’s calls go beyond heavy use of “superintelligence,” which some interpret as an attempt to please the White House after it reportedly disliked the term “artificial intelligence.” Here are three moments from Tesla (TSLA), Meta (META), and IBM (IBM) earnings calls Wednesday night that stuck with us. Tesla 374.58 -11.89 (-3.08%) Close: 4:00:00 pm EDT 373.49 -1.09 (-0.29%) After-hours: 4:14:26 pm EDT Much of the focus today is on Tesla reducing its capital spending plans for this year to $20 billion from the $25 billion it guided three months ago. A key factor appears to be that their Optimus robots need more training before being released into the real world. Elon Musk said that investors should think of Optimus as a baby: “A big difference with Optimus versus cars is that we don’t have this vast fleet of cars from which we can collect training data. With Optimus, we have to start it by making the robots and having them play by themselves, which is really how a human learns to navigate the world. You can see this when you have a small child, and they grow up, and at first, they’re a little wobbly and don’t know how to do things. Over time, they learn to wipe their backs. ass, which is a big milestone. As anyone who’s ever had kids knows, they then learn to read and do all kinds of things and they learn this by playing. In fact, we need Optimus to play at scale to get really good at real-world tasks. Goal 648.85 -48.67 (-6.98%) At close: 4:00:01 pm EDT 647.05 -1.80 (-0.28%) After hours: 4:14:24 pm EDT Are early adopters of Meta’s (META) Muse AI agent spending too much? Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on credit limits during the earnings call suggest they might be. This raises a bigger question: Could the purchase of AI agents end badly for retailers and banks, in the form of unpaid debts and charge-offs? this with an average purchase size of over $200,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “Plaid told us they haven’t seen activity like what they’re seeing with their connector on any other service before. In the first week, we had to work with Stripe to increase credit limits as volumes were higher than any of us expected.” IBM 252.19 +0.73 (+0.29%) Close: 3:59:59 PM EDT 251.79 -0.40 (-0.16%) After Hours: 4:10:15 PM EDT IBM (IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna seemed be in a better place on this earnings call compared to three months ago, which came on the heels of a shocking earnings warning that sent the stock reeling. It was interesting to hear Krishna express some top management concerns about current spending on AI tools: “I think what we’re seeing is that at least the larger companies are becoming much more aware and much more cognizant of what the true return on investment is on all of their AI spending. They are also concerned about whether some AI spending is completely out of control with no real return. But the way I’ve always characterized it is that there’s no question for us, and this is the advice I give to every member of C-suite I know, that what we’re trying to bring to people is the productivity, the benefits of AI, the way it’s going to change work, is very real. Follow Brian Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram and LinkedIn. Story tips? Email him at brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
