Meta hired Alexandr Wang to build AI. It’s Zuckerberg’s job to sell it

Source Domain: www.cnbc.com

A year after spending over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and a group of his top Scale AI engineers to revamp its artificial intelligence efforts, Meta is at least back on the map in AI, though it’s still far behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market.

Wang’s big accomplishment was the delivery of the Muse Spark AI model in April, marking Meta’s first jump into proprietary foundation models and away from a strict adherence to open source, or open weight as it’s more commonly called in AI. The group Wang leads — Meta Superintelligence Labs — was established to give the company some sizzle in the hottest corner of the tech industry.

Now that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his new model, it’s on him to make it a financial success. That means showing the company can attract paying users for its AI tools, rather than just using the technology to enhance and bolster its core advertising business.

“Meta needs to provide more proof points of both adoption and commercialization,” said Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair who recommends buying the stock. “Investors are looking for Meta to monetize a new AI-first product, beyond the substantial positive impact AI is having on enhancing the advertising models.”

Wall Street, at least so far, is unimpressed. Meta’s stock is down 18% over the past 12 months, the worst performer in the megacap group, along with Microsoft, which has its own challenges in AI. That’s even after Meta reported 33% revenue growth in the first quarter, the fastest rate of expansion for any period since 2021.

For Meta, the problem started with what some industry experts called, in hindsight at least, a strategic blunder. The company jumped into AI with its Llama family of models, offering an open-source approach that allowed developers to freely tinker, while the other big model makers charged for access.

In April of last year, Meta’s release of Llama 4 fell flat, failing to captivate developers and leading Zuckerberg to reconsider…

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