Late, under fire, and running out of investor patience, Facebook's "Muse AI" cannot fail
Zuckerberg rolls the dice after burning billions on VR, and “The Metaverse”
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Meta just unveiled its long-awaited AI model. “Muse” is the first major product to emerge from its newly formed Meta Super Intelligence Labs. On paper it sounds impressive. In reality it arrives late, under enormous pressure, and carrying the heavy baggage of Meta’s long string of expensive laboratory flops.
Mark Zuckerberg and his team should be acutely aware that this venture must finally deliver real money. Ninety-eight percent of Meta’s roughly $200 billion in annual revenue still comes from advertising on its social media platforms. After years of pouring tens of billions into virtual reality, “the Metaverse”, and other “Labs” experiments that have largely flopped, investors are running out of patience. The biggest success story Meta can claim in the last fifteen years was Instagram — and they didn’t invent that; they just bought it.
Morningstar analyst Malik Ahmed Khan captured the moment perfectly: “I think Meta had to show investors and operators they have been working on something of substance.” Translation: after burning a ton of cash on one shiny distraction after another, Meta desperately needed to demonstrate it can still innovate, especially in the one area that actually matters right now (and that they have also burned a ton of cash on,) which is AI driven advertising.
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The problem is timing. Meta is arriving late to a game that has already matured. OpenAI and Anthropic have been in the trenches for years, enduring the early rocky starts that the world was willing to forgive because AI itself was brand new. Those models — ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — are now solid enough to be wired directly into enterprise systems. Even Apple, rather than spend billions building its own data centers from scratch, has chosen to plug proven models from OpenAI and Anthropic into Siri. The era of “build everything yourself or die” is over. The winners are the ones who can integrate fast and deliver reliable value.
Meta has no such grace period. It must prove, and prove VERY quickly, that its new model can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the established players. Anything less will be seen as another expensive laboratory experiment in a long line of them.
The pressure is not abstract. Wall Street is already trying to offload a $3 billion slice of Meta’s Prometheus data center project in New Albany, Ohio. That single facility was supposed to be a cornerstone of Meta’s AI ambitions. Instead, it is becoming a visible symbol of the enormous capital expenditure the company is still burning through while it hunts for the next big thing after social media and right now they can’t even get it the power it needs.
The horizon is not clear. Looming lawsuits tied to the decades of documented harm caused by Meta’s social platforms — particularly the damage to children and teenagers — are gathering force.
Hey, Meta, leave our kids alone
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The scale of potential damages is incalculable. While Meta conquered the social media era, it did so by sweeping serious societal costs under the rug in the relentless pursuit of engagement and profit. Those bills are now coming due.
Social Media’s Reckoning Begins
The iconic tagline on the movie poster for the launch of The Social Network movie was “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”
Muse is not just another product. It is a make-or-break moment for the company. Meta needs a genuine, large-scale win in artificial intelligence, and it needs it soon. The social media giant that once seemed invincible is starting to look like the MySpace of the AI age — increasingly yesterday’s platform in a world that has moved on.
The competition is fierce and unforgiving. OpenAI and Anthropic have first-mover credibility and enterprise adoption. Meta’s advantage has always been its enormous user base and data moat, but turning that into a superior general intelligence product is proving far harder than simply acquiring an existing photo-sharing app.
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Investors are watching closely. They have seen Meta spend lavishly on VR headsets that never caught fire and a “Metaverse” that became a punchline. They are in no mood for another multi-billion-dollar science project that fails to generate meaningful revenue. Muse must not only work technically (a big ask) — it must prove it can be monetized at scale, and quickly (an even bigger ask given that even OpenAI is struggling with that.)
The stakes could not be higher. If this venture succeeds, Meta has a genuine shot at remaining one of the defining technology companies of the next decade. If it stumbles, the narrative will harden and Meta will join an inauspicious list: A once-dominant empire that was a household name that could never translate that dominance and cash flow into leadership in a next generation world. For evidence see: Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, Blackberry, Yahoo and - ironically for Meta - MySpace.
Meta built its empire on capturing attention. Now it must prove it can create something that holds real, lasting value beyond the next quarterly earnings call. The clock is ticking, the competition is ahead, and the excuses that were once available to the early AI pioneers no longer apply.
This is Meta’s moment to show the world it can still lead — or confirm that in the age of artificial intelligence it has already become yesterday’s giant.
If Zuck really wants to improve his product he could start by NOT doing the election year censorship CRAP this time, but Nooooo.
If you don’t have a great idea that you can execute and deliver profits to the shareholders then stick with what you do well and significantly increase your quarterly dividends. The money belongs to the shareholders not the geeks with some idea for something that there isn’t a paying customer.