Zuckerberg rushing into every new fad with billions of dollars has somehow tricked people into thinking that's what big tech is about and all of them should be shovelling money into this.

But actually every other company has been much more strategic, Microsoft is bullish because they partnered up with OpenAI and it pumps their share price to be bullish, Google is the natural home of a lot of this research.

But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it.

So there we have it, the companies that have a good strategy for this are investing heavily, the others will pick up merges and key technological partners as the market matures, and presumably Zuck will go off and burn $XB on the next fad once AI has cooled down.

I generally agree with you, although Amazon is really paranoid about being behind here.

On the last earnings call the CEO gave a long rambling defensive response to an analyst question on why they’re behind. Reports from the inside also say that leaders are in full blown panic mode, pressing teams to come up with AI offerings even though Amazon really doesn’t have any recognized AI leaders in leadership roles and the best talent in tech is increasingly leaving or steering clear of Amazon.

I agree they should just focus on what they’re good at, which is logistics and fundamental “boring” compute infrastructure things. However leadership there though is just all over the map trying to convince folks their not behind vs just focusing on strengths.

I'd argue that Meta's income derives in no small part from their best in class ad targeting.

Being on the forefront of

(1) creating a personalized, per user data profile for ad-targeting is very much their core business. An LLM can do a very good job of synthesizing all the data they have on someone to try predicting things people will be interested in.

(2) by offering a free "ask me anything" service from meta.ai which is tied directly to their real-world human user account. They gather an even more robust user profile.

This isn't in-my-opinion simply throwing billions at a problem willy nilly. Figuring out how to apply this to their vast reams of existing customer data economically is going to directly impact their bottom line.

The largest LLMs are mostly going to be running in the cloud, so the general purpose cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) are presumably going to be in the business of serving models, but that doesn't necessarily mean they need to build the models themselves.

LLMs look to be shaping up as an interchangeable commodity as training datasets, at least for general purpose use, converge to the limits of the available data, so access to customers seems just as important, if not more, than the models themselves. It seems it just takes money to build a SOTA LLM, but the cloud providers have more of a moat, so customer access is perhaps the harder part.

Amazon do of course have a close relationship with Anthropic both for training and serving models, which seems like a natural fit given the whole picture of who's in bed with who, especially as Anthropic and Amazon are both focused on business customers.

I think this analysis is a bit shallow with regard to Metas product portfolio and how AI fits in.

Much more than the others, metter runs a content business. Gen AI aides in content generation so it behooves them to research it. Even before the current explosion of chatbots, meta was putting this stuff into their VR framework. It's used for their headset tracking and speech to text is helpful for controlling a headset without a physical keyboard.

You're making it sound like they'll follow anything that walks by but I do think it's more strategic than that.

Zuckerberg bought Whatsapp and Instagram. For normal people, those replaced 90% of the internet here in Argentina

(The other 10% is mostly Google Maps and MercadoLibre.)

Amazon strategy is to invest in the infrastructure, money is where the machines live. I think they just realized none of those companies have a moat, so why would they? But all of them will buy compute

Microsoft has the pleasure of letting you pay for your own hosted GPT models, Mixtral, etc

Microsoft's in a sweet spot. Apple's another interesting one, you can run local LLM models on your Mac really nicely. Are they going to outcompete an Nvidia GPU? Maybe not yet, but they're fast enough as-is.

> But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it.

Amazon is the biggest investor of AI of any company. They've already spent over $100b YTD on capex for AI infrastructure.

> But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it.

I really liked the concept of Apple Intelligence with everything happening all on device, both process and data with minimal reliance off device to deliver the intelligence. It’s been disappointing that it hasn’t come to fruition yet. I am still hopeful the vapor materializes soon. Personally I wouldn’t mind seeing them burning a bit more to make it happen.

Exactly. Being a tech company doesn't mean you need to do everything any more than just because you're a family doctor you also should do trauma surgery, dentistry, and botox injections. Pick a lane, be an expert in it.

Except that Amazon's AWS business is severely threatened by the rise of alternative cloud providers who offer much more AI-friendly environments. It's not an existential topic yet, but could easily turn into one.

Zuckerberg knows what he's doing, his net worth is >250 billion dollars now.

Go all in the new fad, investors pile up on your stock, dump, repeat...

By that logic, a social media company shouldn't rush into it either, but they did anyway.

Zuckerbergs AI "strategy" seems to be to make it easy for people to generate AI slop and share it on FB thus keeping them active on the platform. Or to give people AI "friends" to interact with on FB, thus keeping them on the platform and looking at ads. It's horrifying but it does make business sense (IMHO) at least at first glance.

They have out sensors though for any AGI, because AGI could subvert buisness fields and expertise moats. Thats what most AI teams are- vanity projects and a few experts calming the higher ups every now and then with a "its still just autocompletion on steroids, it can not yet do work and research alone."

> Zuckerberg rushing into every new fad with billions of dollars has somehow tricked people into thinking that's what big tech is about and all of them should be shovelling money into this.

Zuckerberg failed every single fad he tried.

He's becoming more irrelevant every year and only the company's spoils from the past (earned not less by enabling, for example, a genocide to be committed in Myanmar https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...) help carry them through to the series of disastrous idiotic decision Zuck is inflicting on them.

- VR with Oculus. It never caught on, for most people who own one, it's just gathering dust.

- Metaverse. They actually spend billions on that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAL2JZxpoGY

- LLAMA is absolute trash, a dumpster fire in the world of LLMs

Zuck is now trying to jump again on the LLM bandwagon and he's trying to...buy his way in with ridiculous pay packages: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/technology/ai-researchers.... Why is he so wrong to do that, you might ask?

He is doing it at the worst possible moment: LLMs are stagnating and even far better players than Meta like Anthropic and OpenAI can't produce anything worth writing about.

ChatGPT5 was a flop, Anthropic are struggling financially and are lowering token limits and preparing users for cranking up prices, going 180 on their promises not to use chat data for training, and Zuck, in his infinite wisdom, decides to hire top AI talent for premium price at a rapidly cooling market? You can't make up stuff like that.

It would appear that apart from being an ass kisser to Trump, Zuck shares another thing with the orange man-child running the US: a total inability to make good, or even sane deals. Fingers crossed that Meta goes bankrupt just like Trump's 6 banrkruptcies and then Zuck can focus on his MMA career.

So does Pichai... Every time there is something new, he forces Google to pivot, upending everything without much to show for it.

I suppose you could argue that Amazon does have one special thing going for it here, idle compute resources in AWS. However that is not the sort of thing that requires "AI talent" to make use of.