Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth’s apology to staff Monday for the company’s massive layoffs and AI missteps may be a first move to addressing sapped morale but it belies a bigger problem: its AI strategy still doesn’t seem to make sense.
The company is borrowing like mad to build massive data centers to train AI models that are unlikely to ever catch up to the frontier labs. Meta doesn’t have the kind of enterprise businesses that Anthropic or OpenAI have built, which require a huge number of tokens. Nor does it seem like it wants to become a cloud services provider like AWS, Google, or Microsoft.
Meta may have found some traction with its hardware strategy — one that even Apple has had difficulty emulating — but it can’t do much with top-of-the-line frontier models. Even with its billions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook users, when you roll out AI to that many people, you have to use hyper-efficient models to control cost. Pursuing more than that could be a costly distraction.
