In Silicon Valley’s rapidly heating AI war, Mark Zuckerberg is playing all his cards to keep Meta out of the game. However, these aggressive investments are putting serious pressure on the company’s profitability.
The Meta CEO has launched a billion-dollar talent war by poaching researchers from rivals like OpenAI. At the same time, he has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in data center infrastructure. While all this was happening, the company continued with layoffs.According to analysts, Meta’s second-quarter results, to be announced this week, will reflect the lowest profit growth in the last two years. The fact that profit increased by only 11.5% to $15 billion shows the impact of rising operating costs.
Zuckerberg says Meta will offer its AI projects as open source and bring this technology to the public with products such as Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Meta AI and the newly established Superintelligence Lab are working to shape this vision of the company.
However, Meta’s advertising revenue is under pressure from both Trump’s tariffs and competitors like TikTok. Analysts note that Meta’s strong user base and AI-powered content recommendation systems strengthen the company’s hand. But directly competing with firms like OpenAI is still a challenging and expensive path for Meta.
Zuckerberg admits he doesn’t know exactly when superintelligence will become a reality.
Yann LeCun, a leading AI figure at the company, argues that large language models are not sufficient to achieve this goal.“Although Meta’s AI strategy has become clearer, it still feels like it’s searching for direction,” say MoffettNathanson analysts.
