At 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.

You missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example.

Would be very inline with the AI angle.

they are out for your clicks and attention minutes

if OpenAI can build a "social" network of completely generated content, that can kill Meta. Even today I venture to guess that most of the engagements in their platforms is not driven by real friends, so an AI driven platform won't be too different, or it might make content generation be so easy as to make your friends engage again.

Apart from it the ludicrous vision of the metaverse seems much more plausible with highly realistic world models

How do LLMs help with clicks and attention minutes? Why do they spend $100+B a year in AI capex, more than Google and Microsoft that actually rent AI compute to clients? What are they going to do with all that compute? It’s all so confusing

Browse TikTok and you already see AI generated videos popping up. Could well be that the platforms with the most captivating content will not be a "social" network but one consisting of some tailor made feed for you. That could undermine the business model of the existing social networks - unless they just fill it with AI generated content themselves. In other words: Facebook should really invest in good video generating models to keep their platforms ahead.

It might be just me, but in my opinion facebook platforms are way past the "content from your friends phase", but is full of cheap peddled viral content.

If that content becomes even cheaper, of higher quality and highly tailored to you, that is probably worth a lot of money, or at least worth not losing your entire company by a new competitor

But practically speaking, is Meta going to be generating text or video content itself? Are they going to offer some kind of creator tools so you can use it to create video as a user and they need the compute for that? Do they even have a video generation model?

The future is here folks, join us as we build this giant slop machine in order to sell new socks to boomers.

For all of your questions Meta would need a huge research/GPU investment, so that still holds.

In any case if I have to guess, we will see shallow things like the Sora app, a video generation tiktok social network and deeper integration like fake influencers, content generation that fits your preferences and ad publishers preferences

a more evil incarnation of this might be a social network where you aren't sure who is real and who isn't. This will probably be a natural evolution of the need to bootstrap a social network with people and replacing these with LLMs

Sad to hear it has come to attention minutes, used to be seconds.