FB seems to have figured it out finally and their stock took a huge hit for the investment of infra. Also, despite being behind in sota models and huge human capital investments for research, I believe they are benefiting greatly from oai and the likes.

Every image/video/text post on a meta app is essentially subsidized by oai/gemini/anthropic as they are all losing money on inference. Meta is getting more engagement and ad sales through these subsidized genai image content posts.

Long term they need to catch up and training/inference costs need to drop enough such that each genai post costs less than net profit on the ads but they’re in a great position to bridge the gap.

The end of all of this is ad sales. Google and Meta are still the leaders of this. OpenAI needs a social engagement platform or it is only going to take a slice of Google.