Earnings season is in full swing, and Big Tech’s earnings calls are going 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. 386.47 +12.76 (+3.41%) Close: October 21 at 4:00:00 pm EDT 369.86 -16.61 (-4.30%) Premarket: 6:14:34 am EDT Tesla Much of the focus today is on Tesla reducing its capital spending plans for this year to $20 billion from $25 billion 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 says 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 off by making robots and having them play on their own, 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 asses, so which is a big milestone. As anyone who has 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 be really good at real-world tasks. Are early adopters of Meta’s Muse AI agent (META) spending too much? Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on credit limits during the earnings call suggest that they could be. banks, in the form of unpaid debts and write-offs? “The most common use case for Muse is shopping, with more than a quarter of people who use Muse participating in this with an average purchase size of more than $200. Plaid told us they haven’t seen activity like 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 IBM (IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna seemed to 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 senior management concerns about the spending currently being made on AI tools” 251.46 +9.54 (+3.94%) At Close: Oct 21 4:00:03 pm EDT 239.00 -12.06 (-4.80%) Premarket: 6:13:57 am EDT “I think what we’re seeing is that at least the larger companies are becoming much more aware and much more aware of what the true return on investment (ROI) of all their AI spending is. Also “They’re worried that some of the AI will be spent 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 C-suite member I know, that what we’re trying to give people about AI, productivity, the benefits of AI, the way it’s going to change work, is very real. Don’t let me confuse you about it.” Brian Sozzi is the executive editor of Yahoo Finance, host of the Sozzi Unleashed morning show and the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team.
