Meta's big gamble on AI has been a disaster; the mother of all losses. While investing in GPU computing power at least shows some results, the acquisition of teams and hiring cost $16.3 billion, which is about one-third of Meta's annual net profit. So far, no particularly impressive results have emerged, and Meta still lags far behind competitors in AI capabilities.

In June 2025, Meta invested a hefty $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI. Based on the latest 2026 valuation of around $12 billion, this is nearly a 60% decline from when Meta first invested.
With self-evolving agents like openclaw, the reliance on manual annotation for large models is decreasing. Meta originally bought AI data mining rights, only to find out that it was being mined as a gold mine for others.
By the end of 2025, Meta acquired Manus AI for over $2 billion. Their strategic direction in AI Agents looked promising before openclaw emerged, but now, perhaps not so much. With openclaw's appearance, other companies have quickly caught up with Manus, achieving similar results at a lower cost.
A $2 billion price tag is extremely high for a team whose business model isn't fully closed yet. In the fast-changing AI landscape, whether the team and product are worth that much is up to individual judgment.
Zuckerberg's logic: competitiveness = compute power (1 million H100s) + algorithms (Llama open-source ecosystem) + data/agents (Scale AI & Manus). It sounds impressive, but upon closer inspection, each seems to have weaknesses and no particularly strong advantage.
Meta's previous big push into the metaverse ended abruptly, and now they’re rushing into AI again. Does anyone still believe in Meta's future development? $METAON