Meta Swears This Time Is Different

So, Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Like, way back before ChatGPT was even a thing. Before AlphaGo. Before OpenAI existed. Before Google bought DeepMind. There was just FAIR: Facebook AI Research.

I've always found it kinda ironic. Zuck actually had a massive head start in the AI game. In 2013, Facebook nabbed Yann LeCun - literally one of the "godfathers" of AI - to lead their new research division. Zuckerberg himself flew to some fancy AI conference that year to announce FAIR and personally recruit top scientists. Talk about commitment!

FAIR did make some pretty solid contributions to AI research over the years, especially in computer vision stuff. But here's the thing - they weren't really focused on making consumer products. The idea seemed to be that these AI tools would eventually help Facebook's core business. You know, better content moderation, image captioning, that sort of thing.

Fast forward to now, and Meta (that's what they're called these days) is playing serious catch-up in the generative AI space. They're not just trailing behind the obvious players like OpenAI and Google. They're also behind newer companies like Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek - all of which have launched some pretty impressive AI models and chatbots.

Meta did try to respond quickly with their Llama model. But honestly? It's been struggling compared to the competition. Remember when they rolled out Llama 4 back in April? Zuckerberg called it a "beast" - but the results were... disappointing. The experimental version scored really well on benchmarks (second in the world!), but the public version? It ranked 32nd. Ouch.

What's even more telling is that while every other major AI lab has released these new "reasoning" models (which are way better at math and coding problems thanks to some new training methods), Meta hasn't delivered anything comparable yet.

But now they're swearing this time is different. They're going all in on a "superintelligence" team. Will it work? I'm skeptical, but who knows.

The talent acquisition game in AI is brutal right now. Meta's early advantage with LeCun should've given them a massive lead in artificial general intelligence development. Instead, they've had to watch as competitors built more advanced generative AI models while their infrastructure investments didn't quite pay off as expected.

What do you think? Can Meta actually catch up in the AI strategy race? Or is Zuckerberg's superintelligence dream just another case of too little, too late?

I guess we'll find out if Meta's AI advancements finally start matching their ambitions. But from where I'm sitting, they've got a steep hill to climb.