[jdm2212]

Metaverse is exactly my point -- they've incinerated vast amounts of investor money with nothing to show for it. They could've and should've just plowed that money into hundreds of startups.

LLAMA is also exactly my point -- LLMs are pretty well-proven at this point. If you spend $X on machine learning researchers, you can get an LLM with Y parameters that is useful for various tasks like sentiment analysis, machine translation, etc. Facebook should be spending money on that because they have lots of cash, data centers, and ML researchers so they can do this at scale that only a few others can (Google, Microsoft/OpenAI and maybe Amazon).

[ramones13]

That seems like a lot of gross simplifications with hindsight bias.

[jdm2212]

It's really about whether you can incrementally assess P&L.

Facebook has epic amounts of user-generated imagery and text, and incremental improvements in NLP and computer vision generate incremental revenue (and profit) because you can put up better ads and introduce new features like translation. As an investor, that is very appealing.

There's no incremental revenue from Metaverse. It's a huge money pit, with no obvious end date for when enough billions have been wasted to call it quits. It could well work out, but if I'm an investor why would I want to invest in this through Facebook rather than through a bunch of startups pursuing a diverse set of strategies.