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caslon | 1 year ago
Even assuming the current push toward general AI is a bubble, which is not unreasonable, the company can afford to throw away billions of dollars. It doesn't matter at all; they own the money printer and can make as many bets in as many markets as they want.
The same GPUs that are presently being used to create semi-open AI projects can just as easily be repurposed to power a public launch of their Codec avatars, which are lightyears ahead of what Apple has, or for better prediction engines in what are quite probably the best sales engines of all time: Their websites.
Their data centers will be useful for the future of selling products to gullible consumers: Short-form video, which is the first chance in years that they've had to meaningfully take market share from Google.
Even assuming it was all vanity, Zuckerberg has earned the right at this stage in his career to make vanity plays. He still has majority control over his company, which shareholders have insisted upon, and he has an almost untarnished record of making incredible long-term bets that seem irrational at the time (Instagram acquisition, Whatsapp acquisition, arguably the Oculus acquisition).
He's earned drastic amounts of money for speculators, who have done little to deserve any of it. It would be a strange thing to argue that the speculators suddenly have a better grasp of what he's doing than he does; there are millions of speculators, but only one person with a track record like Zuckerberg.
red-iron-pine|1 year ago
how's the metaverse going?
caslon|1 year ago