Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

I agree that this is a possible reason. Meta wants to move fast and m&a is too slow for their tastes. I make the case in the article though that the actual acquisition doesn't really make sense for metas core business, but I agree it's possible.

I disagree that this is a win/win. Scale stock is still illiquid, and people who remain at scale or have scale stock are now stuck with shares that are actually less valuable -- even though the market price has ostensibly gone up, the people who made the stock valuable are gone

>They have no authority to review a minority investment.

That's just wrong. Partial acquisitions and minority shareholdings don't allow you to bypass antitrust investigations.

See 15 U.S.C. §18 for example. It is similar in the EU.

Reportedly the only reason they did this at all is that Wang asked to get a return for investors and employees. It was not Meta who wanted to own any part of Scale (makes sense too, they are already users of Scale data and don't really need anything they get from owning Scale as a company / business).

The Llama 4 benchmarks published by Meta were proven to be fake immediately after it launched.

I think there's basically the benchmarks, and then "the benchmarks". The former is, like, actual stuff you can quantify and game. And the latter is the public response. The former is a leading indicator but it's not always accurate, and the latter is what actually matters. I knew Gemini 2.5 was better than Claude 3.7 based on the Reddit reaction lol

In retrospect it’s quite amazing how Jony Ive managed to make a superstar career out of almost directory copying Dieter Rams all the time.

I can’t imagine what kind of value he could bring to OpenAI.

The dude ruined Apple laptops for 5 years, he really should be an industry castaway.

In retrospect it wasn't really that the models were that bad compared to benchmarks, it was that Meta didn't work with inference engine providers ahead of time to integrate the new architecture like other teams usually do, so it was even more bugged than expected for the first few weeks.

The second problem that compounded it was that both L4 models were too large for 99.9% of people to run, so the only opinion most people had of it was what the few that could load it were saying after release. And they weren't saying good things.

So after inference was fixed the reputation stuck because hardly anyone can even run these behemoths to see otherwise. Meta really messed up in all ways they possibly could, short of releasing the wrong checkpoint or something.

At least they could pivot Hotdog or Not into a dick-pic classifier, which was less trivial when that show was airing.

$14 billion for a glorified mechanical turk platform is bananas. Between this, the $6 billion Jonny Ive acquisition, and a ChatGPT wrapper for doctors called Abridge having a $5 billion valuation, this AI fraud bubble is making pets.com look like a reasonable investment.

Same way companies fell behind during the original "dot com" era: By not burning money quickly enough.

Disclosure: I work for one of the companies that fell behind.

Their latest Llama is a couple steps behind the frontier. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all well ahead.

They missed the boat on LLMs and have been playing catch up.

Deepseek is a solid competitor in their niche, the open-source LLM niche. Llama 4 didn't impress, and so they are very vulnerable even in the free niche they carved out for themselves

How much revenue do they make with it?

I'm a Zuck fan, and I think I could mount a compelling case for that take. But that was not the article to do so. And people can def disagree, there's good arguments on the other side

> Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade.

Wrong metric to evaluate dynamism and capability.

Also the Ray Ban Metas have been pretty successful. They consistently sell out

Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade.

You don't need a 'new trick' when the main business is so frigging profitable and scalable. There is this myth that companies need to keep innovating. At a certain point, when the competition is so weak, you don't.

Tobacco stocks have been among the best investment over the past century even though the product never changed. Or Walmart--it's the same type of store, but scaled huge.

The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram’s lunch is downright embarrassing.

Not really. Instagram is more popular than ever and much more profitable. It's not all or nothing .Both sites can coexist and thrive, like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

…have you seen $META?