Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.
Meta will always need the next platform. Instagram, Facebook phone, Whatsapp, Reels, Marketplace, Portal, VR, AI... Some succed, some fail. When you are an Ads company, the surface where ads are delivered to is important. I don't think it's a fundamentally different business model from Google's. VR addresses an interesting and increasing niche of people that refuse human contact and prefer the online world - for those people clothes, going out, buying a car, spending money on whatever the current society spends money on might not be so interesting, instead a parallel, virtual world, might be.
As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.
Meta will always need the next platform. Instagram, Facebook phone, Whatsapp, Reels, Marketplace, Portal, VR, AI... Some succed, some fail. When you are an Ads company, the surface where ads are delivered to is important. I don't think it's a fundamentally different business model from Google's. VR addresses an interesting and increasing niche of people that refuse human contact and prefer the online world - for those people clothes, going out, buying a car, spending money on whatever the current society spends money on might not be so interesting, instead a parallel, virtual world, might be.
As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511112
Meta only recently announced a “long term” partnership with Nvidia:
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-...
So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?
This is similar to AWS & their Graviton VMs.