Can Meta actually win the AI race, or is the idea just another one of Mark Zuckerberg’s pipe dreams? Zuckerberg’s fantasies, combined with his delusions of genius, potentially overstate the role that luck and outside input have played in the rise of his social media empire, and could be blinding him from reality.
This statement could potentially be applied to all the leading minds in tech. Elon Musk, for example, has invested wisely, but government grants and the research breakthroughs of others have amplified his achievements.
Sam Altman didn’t create the technology that powers OpenAI, but he has become the face of the business, which lends more weight to his opinions.
But like every success story, there’s some luck involved. It’s impossible to discount the serendipity of being in the right place at the right time, and coming across the right thing at the right moment.
This is where Zuckerberg comes in. The original idea for Facebook may not have even been entirely his, yet he’s parlayed the platform into a trillion-dollar business through clever business strategies and smart acquisitions. Those choices have given Meta the market power and reach to make moves that could have significant societal impacts..
But for all of the company’s wins, there have also been poorly placed bets and significant losses that have come as a result of Zuckerberg’s desire to eliminate his competition and dominate in evolving markets.
Meta famously succeeded with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. However, it was unable to acquire Snapchat, despite Zuckerberg’s best efforts. In 2013, the BBC reported that Snapchat Chief Evan Spiegel rejected Meta’s $3 billion takeover offer. That rebuff prompted Zuckerberg to invest significant resources in various Snapchat-like apps and formats.
Meta (which was called Facebook until 2021) released a separate Snapchat clone app called Slingshot in 2014, but that project ultimately failed.
Meta did gain some traction with Stories, a format originally designed by Snapchat. But creating Stories cost Meta a lot of money and time, and the project clearly hasn’t succeeded in overpowering Snapchat as a competitor.
Meta has also tried to replicate other trending apps, such as group live-streaming app Houseparty and audio chat app Clubhouse. However, Meta’s attempts, called Bonfire and Hotline, respectively, both failed to gain traction.
In fact, Meta doesn’t have much to show off in terms of innovation, apart from replicating or acquiring other apps and tools.
The company currently dominates messaging because of WhatsApp, which it didn’t create. Meanwhile, Reels drives almost all of the engagement growth on Facebook and Instagram, but that’s a feature Meta copied from TikTok. In addition, Meta acquired Oculus as part of its move into VR, which eventually led to Meta’s ill-fated metaverse push.
More recently, Meta has developed AI glasses, though it has done so with significant assistance from EssilorLuxottica. The eyewear company has played a key role in the design process, which is a critical selling point.
However, almost all of the projects that Meta has invented on its own have ended up being expensive side quests for the company. Some of those projects include its Portal video connection device, its effort to connect remote regions to the internet via drones, its cryptocurrency project and Instant Articles for publishers, all of which have failed dramatically.
Fortunately for Meta, its core ad business is so strong, and its revenue results are so significant that there’s no major business impact due to these failures. In fact, these experiments make sense in the broader context of pursuing relevance and growth.
It’s against this backdrop that Zuckerberg has positioned himself as a visionary.
The metaverse was one of Zuckerberg’s most high-profile and expensive experiments. Meta made a major promotional push to showcase what it presented as the next generation of digital connectivity.
Then artificial intelligence gained traction. Zuckerberg saw what was happening in AI, and decided that this was the actual tech development of a generation, not the metaverse. He immediately became obsessed with winning the AI race.
It’s worth noting that Meta has been investing in this technology for some time. Subsequently, Zuckerberg lost interest in his metaverse vision, which he had been all-in on just a year or so before OpenAI released ChatGPT.
Meta has now invested hundreds of billions of dollars into data center projects, flashy staff hires and systematic updates as Zuckerberg looks to leverage Meta’s scale and resources to overtake its AI competitors..
But this may be a race Meta cannot win. Ultimately, Meta may not even want to win this one, given the questionable profit margins that come with these expanding AI projects.
While the tech industry is obsessed with AI, practical use data isn’t matching the hype. Many of the businesses that have adopted AI tools haven’t seen the productivity those tools promised, and many companies have not been able to leverage AI in a way that enables them to significantly reduce staff costs by outsourcing work to AI agents.
A study published earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among nearly 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers and other executives, the vast majority reported seeing little operations-level impact from AI.
If the predicted gains can’t be realized, then Meta may be burning money on yet another expensive project.
Meta reportedly sunk more than $80 billion on the metaverse, though as Business Insider reported, much of that development was later transferred to other projects, and Meta is still working on its VR tech. But even if the company only lost half the amount it spent, it would still represent a massive hit. The investment figure also underlines just how convinced Zuckerberg was that the concept represented a viable, valuable pathway.
Meta’s AI bets are even riskier.
Based on the company’s current outlay for AI projects, it would take it more than a decade to break even on the expenditure even if Meta were bringing in $100 billion per year from AI subscriptions.
Meta’s total revenue for 2025 was $200.97 billion, with just $4.8 billion of that coming from non-advertising intake.
That means the company needs to turn AI into a business in its own right, and ensure that business is at least half as profitable as one of the most profitable businesses in the world. And that’s just what it needs to do in order to recover the costs it has already sunk into the project..
Is this even possible?
It seems like Meta is taking a significant gamble. Given Meta’s track record for innovation, it’s not clear that the company has the capacity to make this work, unless it copies or acquires some other breakthrough AI provider
