Mark Zuckerberg’s Pivot to AI Is Blowing Up in His Face Spectacularly

Mark Zuckerberg has decided that the best way to convince investors he knows what he's doing is to raise his AI bet from $125 billion to at least $130 billion, on the grounds that a $5 billion mistake is somehow more impressive than a $125 billion one. This revelation, delivered during Meta's second-quarter earnings call, came with the admission that there is 'little to show' from the company's AI spending so far. Little to show, but at least there is a show, and it's the priciest one in town.

The star of this spectacular performance is Muse Spark, Meta's in-house frontier model, which has been delayed so many times that its release date now resembles a Brexit deadline: perpetually promised, endlessly deferred. Developers waiting on the model might as well take up knitting, because Meta's approach appears to be that if you can't ship a product, you can at least ship a press release about how committed you are to shipping it. One can almost hear the internal meetings: 'The model isn't ready, but the narrative is.' Indeed, Muse Spark has apparently achieved sentience only in the sense that it has transcended the physical realm of actual code and now exists purely as a marketing concept.

What makes the whole tableau so exquisitely grotesque is the doubling down. Rather than pausing to ask why $130 billion has produced so little, Zuckerberg is acting like a gambler who's lost his shirt at the roulette wheel and decides the remedy is a bigger bet on black. The move mirrors the Metaverse fiasco exactly, except this time the virtual nothingness is AI-flavoured. After all, why invest in a future you can't see when you can invest in a future you can't even imagine? It's a strategy, I suppose, and at these prices it had better be the last one. Perhaps the most charitable reading is that Zuckerberg is conducting an experiment in whether investors will keep funding a company that proudly announces its own lack of results while simultaneously raising the stakes.