Mark Zuckerberg told the Financial Times the United States should not block Chinese AI models, and warned of "regulatory capture" if American frontier labs help vet competing models. He made the case in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a New York Times interview the same day.
Pragmatic, but revealing. If Meta truly believed Llama would stay ahead, it would not be preparing for a future where competitors power its products. It also makes business sense for Meta because it already rents out compute capacity instead of using it for its own models: supporting multiple leading models could attract more customers to its infrastructure.
Given the demand, it’s not unreasonable to think they could just as easily sell compute to OpenAI or Claude or whoever the domestic flavour of the month is…
So the question is, are they doing this to avoid admitting defeat?
Answer is obviously no, if they’d use a Chinese model. That is admission of defeat I itself.
So then, it is outsourcing more clever models than they know how to produce.
And then, the AI stigma plus the anti-China stigma works against them.
I think Facebook will be the first to fall.
Divest immediately.
Meta can absolutely pivot to renting compute for whatever model wins, but calling that an automatic death spiral feels premature: Companies with billions of users can survive technical setbacks for years. Betting against distribution has humbled plenty of investors before.
What strikes me as particularly risky at Meta is the sheer amount of power Zuckerberg wields: ultimately, it’s the same problem as with Musk, even though Zuck has behaved much more moderately so far.
How many users are required for a “classifieds” website to remain profitable, if say most abandon the “social” part? Make no mistake, it’s dying.
The answer might be that it obviously depends on how companies many still pump advertising budget into it.
But the advertising budget 20% rule has been fucked up since 2007, I think.
And it seems to be being readdressed currently.
Wrongly again, likely . But currently.
Unfortunately, it is highly likely to take decades before Meta loses its relevance: the network effects are enormous, and the vast majority of people over 35 will probably only leave Instagram and (from the age of 60) Facebook completely in exceptional circumstances. And I don’t even want to get started on WhatsApp…
Pragmatic, but revealing. If Meta truly believed Llama would stay ahead, it would not be preparing for a future where competitors power its products. It also makes business sense for Meta because it already rents out compute capacity instead of using it for its own models: supporting multiple leading models could attract more customers to its infrastructure.
Given the demand, it’s not unreasonable to think they could just as easily sell compute to OpenAI or Claude or whoever the domestic flavour of the month is…
So the question is, are they doing this to avoid admitting defeat?
Answer is obviously no, if they’d use a Chinese model. That is admission of defeat I itself.
So then, it is outsourcing more clever models than they know how to produce.
And then, the AI stigma plus the anti-China stigma works against them.
I think Facebook will be the first to fall.
Divest immediately.
Meta can absolutely pivot to renting compute for whatever model wins, but calling that an automatic death spiral feels premature: Companies with billions of users can survive technical setbacks for years. Betting against distribution has humbled plenty of investors before.
What strikes me as particularly risky at Meta is the sheer amount of power Zuckerberg wields: ultimately, it’s the same problem as with Musk, even though Zuck has behaved much more moderately so far.
How many users are required for a “classifieds” website to remain profitable, if say most abandon the “social” part? Make no mistake, it’s dying.
The answer might be that it obviously depends on how companies many still pump advertising budget into it.
But the advertising budget 20% rule has been fucked up since 2007, I think.
And it seems to be being readdressed currently.
Wrongly again, likely . But currently.
Unfortunately, it is highly likely to take decades before Meta loses its relevance: the network effects are enormous, and the vast majority of people over 35 will probably only leave Instagram and (from the age of 60) Facebook completely in exceptional circumstances. And I don’t even want to get started on WhatsApp…