What was their vision for AI to begin with?
I totally understand what OpenAI and Google are trying to do with AI but I never understood Meta's angle.
What's Meta's AI product?
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They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
It might surprise you to find out that Ray-Ban Meta glasses don't offer any sort of subscription service, not even as an option. Every Meta AI user is just costing Meta money, Meta isn't even giving them the option to buy the product from them.
I have no idea why. The kind of people who would buy Meta glasses would probably happily blow $10-20 on a subscription they forget about. You can get a subscription service for a robot litter box but you can't get one for AI glasses? Does Meta hate money?
Meta uses AI to search through Facebook and Instagram which...just makes searches cost them more money, I guess?
Sounds like they have pockets so deep that they are going into debt, which is an interesting sort of pocket depth.
IMO Zuckerberg's amateur founder status is more blatant as time goes on. He had his one moonshot and thinks he can do it again just as easily. Nobody told him that a large chunk of his success is owed to fortuitous timing.
I think there's been something of a cancerous ideology that you must be a first mover. It's a bit odd considering that Facebook itself was not a first mover in pretty much everything that it does that is successful and highly profitable.
This is part of a pattern of tech leaders investing in order to avoid getting shut-out of whatever the next paradigm of computing is supposed to be.
- Google building Google+ and stuffing social into everything to avoid getting shut out of social networking. (The fear Larry/Sergey felt about this is why Vic Gundotra could bully and survive scandals until it became clear that Facebook wasn't an existential threat/Google+ was not going to really compete)
- Meta attempting to build an AI assistant because they were afraid Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri would be how everyone accessed computers in the future (due to technical failure, this product only ever launched as control mechanism for Oculus, but the ambition was larger)
Of course this always come alongside other factors that lead others to follow when a new concept is proven; however a tell-tale sign that leadership is worried about market dominance rather than a mere new line of business is that they spend or throw weight around above and beyond what the new line of business alone would justify.