Zuckerberg Is Tilting at Windmills
As we wrote back on April 8th, where would META be without China? Asia-Pac is the primary source of META’s growth, in particular China, in particular TEMU parent PDD. There is little growth outside of Asia-Pac.
Zuck has always spun (as do many CEOs when engaging with the street), however, META has precisely a zero percent chance of building the world’s leading Gen AI platform as he stated in META’s EPS press release (below).
"It's been a good start to the year," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. "The new version of Meta AI with Llama 3 is another step towards building the world's leading AI. We're seeing healthy growth across our apps and we continue making steady progress building the metaverse as well."
I am all for META incorporating Gen AI into its applications where it makes sense to do so. However, META would have been better served to have partnered with OpenAI or Google for Gen AI services (note: header art of this article created with Google Gemini).
META’s Llama Gen AI effort is wasted Cap Ex in my view. To chase OpenAI and Google in the Gen AI space is a fool’s errand.