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Comment by hagbarth | Hacker News Reader

But Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.

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True. But then again they own the consumer side.

If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.

As the Facebook generation dies out, so does Facebook. I just don't see it. Meta will have to continue to buy competition and hope that the ad market stays a racket forever. The only reason Meta is still relevant is advertising, just the same as Google. Eventually enough people will realize it for what it's worth: anti-competitive enshittification in order to preserve multi-billion dollar companies that have products and services that suck so bad you'd have a hard time paying people to use if they were startups today.

Maybe the plan is to buy up all the companies that currently pay them for ads?

Being skeptical of all the numbers I see - it still seems instagram is on roughly even footing with TikTok for upcoming generations.

I don’t doubt they may destroy their own product (like google search) but I do think it’s going to take a long long time

And now threads which apparently is quietly growing

While facebook does seem to decline somewhat in use in my younger friendcircle, Instragram and Whatsapp seem to be larger than ever.

Very vibes based take.

I agree with that. It's a bet they have to make. They are just in a worse position to make it than some of the other companies.

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