Meta Offers 95% Discount for Muse Spark AI - Mark Zuckerberg Pees on Sam Altman

Eli the Computer Guy (0:00)

I have to admit, I do think Mark Zuckerberg is one hell of a bastard, but it does put a smile on my face when he's a bastard to the rest of the technology industry. So one of the things you have to think about in the technology world, one of the things you have to realize in the technology world is that many times that the technology oligarchs basically screw each other over simply because they can. It might not actually make a lot of business sense. It might not actually bring in any revenue or profit, but basically do remember that the big tech world is essentially one hyper-scaled pissing contest. And if one oligarch gets the chance to piss on another oligarch, by God, they're gonna take it. And so that's one of the things I've been talking about for a while with the whole question of the value of AI companies. Not necessarily the value of the AI stack. The AI stack is the technology, the hardware and software that goes in to building this thing that we call artificial intelligence. That, again, there is value there. It is worth at least as much as NoSQL was. But there's a stack. But then on the other side is the businesses themselves. This is with Anthropic trying to be valued at $2 trillion. And OpenAI, Sam Altman, saying that anything less than a $1 trillion valuation is a non-starter. And one of the problems you run into in this world is that you have other tech CEOs that just kind of decide to do things because they can. And Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example of somebody who has way too much money, basically no checks and balances. And so he's throwing cash around and doesn't really care who the hell he screws, right? So with Meta right now, they're really pushing into artificial intelligence. You know, for some reason, I still haven't heard a good reason why. I have talked with former Meta employees. I've talked with current Meta employees. I have told them face to face, looked at them in the eyeballs and said, look, I understand you have probably signed non-disclosure agreements. I understand that legally you can't tell me what's actually going on. So I don't want any specifics. I don't want any generalities. All I want you to do is nod your head if you have heard the strategy around all of this investment in artificial intelligence for Meta, and you understand how this is going to bring a tremendous amount of value to Meta in the future.

And then they just look at me.

Oh, so you have no idea what Meta is doing either. Great. That's just wonderful. But anyways, Meta is out there right now. They're building all this AI stuff. They're building humanoid robots.

Why is Meta focused on humanoid robots? Who the hell knows? Basically, Elon Musk is focused on humanoid robots. Ergo, Mark Zuckerberg needs to be working on humanoid robots. But that's one of the things. Google it. But one of the big things right now, again, is they're building AI. So they had their Lama model. So they had the Lama models, which were open weights models that they produced a couple of years ago. Lama 3 was great. Lama 4 wasn't so good. Then they decided those were open. So then they decided to do closed models. So it was like avocado, avocado and something else. So those are closed models. Those closed models, I think, came out at the beginning of this year, something like that. They were supposed to be relatively good. But again, they're relatively good. It's just a saturated market space. And so now they came out with the Spark models, where they've gone back to open source, open weights for whatever reason. And again, and think about this, right? Think about OpenAI, think about Anthropic. When OpenAI competes against Anthropic, they're both basically on the same playing field, right? They're getting investment money, they're using the same hardware, they're selling products, they're trying to get revenue, they're trying to get profit. The issue for Anthropic and OpenAI is when they start competing against Google and Facebook, right? Google basically is printing cash all day long, and so they take some of the money that they got from printing cash, they put it into artificial intelligence. And so even if AI isn't profitable now, they can simply say they're investing into the future, and everybody nods their heads and says, oh, that makes sense. Again, when Google does it, it probably makes sense. Again, you have Mark Zuckerberg with Meta, right? Printing cash from Facebook and from Instagram. So he takes that money, he puts that into artificial intelligence, and he really doesn't care. He doesn't fucking care whether there's revenue, whether there's profit, whether there's user growth, right? Because remember, he has super majority voter rights for Facebook, for Meta. So basically nobody, none of the shareholders can outvote him for anything. So basically he can just dump tremendous amounts of money into these projects just because he wants to. And so he's dumping all this money into artificial intelligence, right? And so that becomes a very difficult thing for these AI companies to deal with. Now what's interesting, so again with all these companies, one of the big issues that they've been running into is training data. How do they get their hands on training data? There's all kinds of weird stuff that's been going on, so these AI companies get their hands on training data. So now what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, so Mark Zuckerberg is kind of sitting there, he's like, well, you know, I don't really give a fuck about profit anyway. I don't give a shit about revenue anyway. What do I want? I want better AI. So what he's now doing is he's dropping the price. So for the hosted Spark LLM, he's dropping the price by 95%.