Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made the rash decision to double-down on massive AI spending, pushing a cutesy AI-mascot and poaching tech industry veteran Chirantan Desai to run a new division pushing Meta’s AI onto corporate customers.
The company’s investors, however, appear to be running out of slack for Zuckerberg’s leash. Since Friday of last week, a large sell-off in Meta stocks shrunk his paper fortune by nearly $20 billion, after Goldman Sachs began raising doubts about the long-term viability of the company’s AI ambitions.
Zuckerberg’s temporary losses notwithstanding — Meta’s stock is still up more than 28 percent over the last month — it does raise the question as to how much capital will be made available to satisfy the tech industry’s pie-in-the-sky AI push, and whether it can ever achieve revenue that would offset it.
In addition to Goldman Sachs’ gloomy outlook for Meta, hyperscalers as a whole face what appears to be an insurmountable challenge in turning AI into a profitable venture. As Bloomberg reported, the major management consulting firm Bain and Co recently penned an analysis finding that the AI industry will need to reach an annual revenue of $6 trillion by 2031 if tech leaders continue along their current spend-happy trajectory.
