Can Meta truly win the AI race, or is this just another pipe dream for Mark Zuckerberg? Zuckerberg's fantasies, combined with his self-aggrandizing delusions of genius, may exaggerate the role that luck and external factors played in the rise of his social media empire, and may prevent him from seeing reality clearly.

This assertion may also apply to other leading figures in the tech world. For example, Elon Musk has keen investment insight, but government subsidies and research breakthroughs by others have amplified his achievements.

Sam Altman is not the creator of OpenAI's core technology, but he has become the company's spokesperson, which gives his views more weight.

However, every success story contains an element of luck. We cannot overlook the role of serendipity—being in the right place at the right time, encountering the right thing at the right moment.

Zuckerberg is exactly such a case. The original idea for Facebook may not even have been entirely his, but through shrewd business strategies and wise acquisitions, he built the platform into a trillion-dollar enterprise. These choices gave Meta the market influence and reach to make moves that could have significant societal impact.

But despite the company's many victories, Zuckerberg's decisions to eliminate competition and dominate emerging markets have also led to some missteps and major losses.

Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp are well-known successes. However, despite Zuckerberg's best efforts, it failed to acquire Snapchat. In 2013, the BBC reported that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel rejected Meta's $3 billion acquisition offer. This rejection prompted Zuckerberg to pour significant resources into developing various Snapchat-like apps and formats.

Meta (formerly Facebook until 2021) released a standalone Snapchat clone app called Slingshot in 2014, but the project ultimately failed.

Meta did make some progress with the Stories feature—a format originally designed by Snapchat. But developing Stories cost Meta a significant amount of money and time, and the project clearly failed to suppress Snapchat as a competitor.

Meta also tried to replicate other popular apps, such as the group live-streaming app Houseparty and the audio-chat app Clubhouse. However, Meta's corresponding attempts—named Bonfire and Hotline, respectively—failed to gain market traction.

In fact, apart from copying or acquiring other apps and tools, Meta has little to show for its own innovation.

The company currently dominates the messaging space thanks to WhatsApp, which it did not create. Meanwhile, Reels drives almost all engagement growth on Facebook and Instagram, but this feature was copied by Meta from TikTok. Additionally, Meta acquired Oculus as part of its foray into VR, which ultimately led to Meta's ill-fated metaverse project.

Recently, Meta developed AI glasses, but this was done with significant assistance from EssilorLuxottica. The eyewear company played a key role in the design process, and design is the critical selling point.

However, almost everything Meta has invented on its own has ended up as an expensive "side quest" for the company. Some of these projects include its Portal video-calling device, efforts to connect remote areas to the internet via drones, a cryptocurrency project, and Instant Articles for publishers—all of which ended in failure.

Fortunately, Meta's core advertising business is strong enough and its revenue performance substantial enough that these failures have not had a major business impact on the company. In fact, in the broader context of pursuing relevance and growth, these experiments are reasonable.

It is in this context that Zuckerberg positions himself as a visionary.

The metaverse is one of Zuckerberg's most high-profile and expensive experiments. Meta launched a massive campaign to showcase what it called the next generation of digital connectivity.

Then, artificial intelligence began to gain attention. Zuckerberg saw the developments in AI and concluded that this was the true generational technological shift, not the metaverse. He immediately became obsessed with winning the AI race.

Notably, Meta has been investing in this technology for some time. Since then, Zuckerberg has lost interest in the metaverse vision—one he had fully committed to just about a year before OpenAI released ChatGPT.

Meta has already poured tens of billions of dollars into data center projects, made high-profile talent hires, and undertaken systematic updates. Zuckerberg hopes to use Meta's scale and resources to surpass its AI competitors.

But this may be a race Meta cannot win. Ultimately, given the questionable profit margins of these expanding AI projects, Meta may not even want to win it.

Despite the tech industry's obsession with AI, actual usage data does not match the hype. Many businesses that have adopted AI tools have not seen the productivity gains these tools promised, and many companies have failed to significantly cut staffing costs by outsourcing work to AI agents.

A study published earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among nearly 6,000 CEOs, CFOs, and other executives, the vast majority said AI has had minimal impact on their operations.

If the expected benefits fail to materialize, then Meta may be burning money on yet another expensive project.

Meta reportedly spent over $80 billion on the metaverse, but as Business Insider reported, much of that development was later redirected to other projects, and Meta continues to work on its VR technology. But even if the company lost only half of what it invested, it would still be a massive loss. This investment figure also highlights how firmly Zuckerberg believed the metaverse concept was a viable and valuable path.

Meta's AI bet is even riskier.

Based on the company's current spending on AI projects, even if Meta generates $100 billion in annual revenue from AI subscriptions, it would take more than a decade to recoup its costs.

Meta's total revenue in 2025 was $200.97 billion, of which only $4.8 billion came from non-advertising revenue.

This means the company needs to turn AI into a standalone business and ensure that business is at least half as profitable as one of the most profitable businesses in the world. And that is merely the minimum required to recoup the costs the company has already invested.

Is this even possible?

Meta appears to be making a huge gamble. Given Meta's track record in innovation, unless it copies or acquires another AI provider that achieves a breakthrough, it remains unclear whether the company is capable of making this work.