META’S REAL AI WAS HIDING
IN PLAIN SIGHT. 💎
I watched a video this morning called 'The (Overdue) Collapse of Meta,' expecting another story about a giant technology company finally coming unstuck.
BUT THAT REALLY WASN'T THE STORY.
Meta is still making extraordinary amounts of money.
The metaverse was a spectacular failure. Zuckerberg renamed the company around it, talked about a billion people eventually inhabiting virtual worlds, and poured tens of billions of dollars into trying to make it happen.
PEOPLE MOSTLY DIDN'T COME.
But while everyone was laughing at cartoon legs and expensive headsets, something else inside Meta was working extraordinarily well.
THE ADVERTISING MACHINE
For more than a decade, Meta has been using AI to learn from the tiny signals produced by billions of human brains. What we stop to look at. What we click. What we ignore. What keeps us scrolling?
WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO BUY
And increasingly, what we might be about to do. That system became astonishingly good at turning human behaviour into advertising revenue. Which changes the story rather dramatically.
META DIDN'T FAIL TO BUILD POWERFUL AI.
It was built years ago. It just wasn't sitting there chatting pleasantly to us. It was behind Facebook and Instagram, watching behaviour and learning how to predict it.
And the enormous advertising business generated by that machinery is now helping to finance Meta's next gigantic gamble: superintelligence, data centres, researchers, and infrastructure costing tens of billions of dollars.
There is something almost perfect about that. The metaverse failed because people didn't particularly want what Meta was selling. The advertising machine succeeded because we WERE what Meta was selling. And perhaps that is the part worth paying attention to.
Because sometimes the most important question about technology isn't:
DID IT WORK?
It is:
WHAT DID IT LEARN TO DO TO US?
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