Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off

Meta's goal is to stop OpenAI, Google and/or Anthropic from shutting them out of whatever AI ends up delivering. This is why they went with open weights for LLama - it prevents the other players becoming gatekeepers.

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.