In 2025, Meta spent $14 billion to bring Alexandr Wang and his Scale AI team into the fold.
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One year later, the company is facing substantial pressure to prove it can monetize the resulting tools such as its Muse Spark model as its stock continues to underperform compared to other tech giants, CNBC reported Sunday (June 14).
“Meta needs to provide more proof points of both adoption and commercialization,” Ralph Schackart, a William Blair analyst who recommends buying the stock, told CNBC.
“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.”
Unlike its predecessors, Muse Spark is a proprietary foundation model created for internal integration across Meta’s ecosystem, which includes social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as hardware like its Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
“There’ll be a lot of these frontier model providers that will fundamentally change in lots of different ways, and Meta needs to have a consistent, reliable proprietary model that they themselves own,” said Thomas Randall, an analyst at the Info-Tech Research Group, per the CNBC report.
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He added that Meta would be lost if CEO Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t shelled out to hire Wang and other high-profile AI figures, calling it a “strategic rebuild” for the company.
Randall said that while Meta hasn’t taken the “most optimized route,” he could at least “now see a vision for what they’re trying to achieve and what Wang has been trying to achieve.”
This is happening amid in-house instability, following the layoff of 8,000 workers last month. Sources familiar with the matter told CNBC Meta is dealing with tension at the top of the AI organization, noting that Wang and other big name hires are under severe pressure to provide meaningful growth to justify the company’s massive spending.
The news follows reports from earlier this month that Meta had postponed plans to share its latest AI models with developers with no schedule for a release of the new model.
The delay, which has stretched almost two months since Meta told developers a release was coming “soon,” is leading to questions about how fast the company can monetize its vast spending on AI development, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
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