Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.
Meta was on a roll with their early research and work with Llama and other models. Then it all just seemed to trail off. I’m sure they’re doing some interesting things internally but it does feel like they were in the right place to have capitalized on it a lot more.
Facebook's strength has never been innovation, but adapting to the changes; mostly through acquisition.
With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage.
Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)
Meta will always need the next platform. Instagram, Facebook phone, Whatsapp, Reels, Marketplace, Portal, VR, AI... Some succed, some fail. When you are an Ads company, the surface where ads are delivered to is important. I don't think it's a fundamentally different business model from Google's. VR addresses an interesting and increasing niche of people that refuse human contact and prefer the online world - for those people clothes, going out, buying a car, spending money on whatever the current society spends money on might not be so interesting, instead a parallel, virtual world, might be.
As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
meta had the gpus to train llama because of their capital spend on horizons, so at least they were in the game, but maybe he didn't see "chatbot" as a trillion dollar product category
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage.
Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)
As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-...
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?