Zuckerberg's "AI Determination": Even if AI lags behind and Llama 4 is continuously delayed, more money still needs to be poured in

In the latest financial report released on Wednesday, Meta significantly raised its capital expenditure budget for this year, continuing to make substantial bets on AI.

However, in reality, Meta is facing numerous challenges in the AI field: delays in the release of AI technologies, skepticism about its "open source" strategy, and the key Llama 4 Behemoth model has yet to be launched... Investors are eager to know, what is the future of Meta?

LlamaCon Conference "Loud Thunder, Little Rain": Developers Disappointed, Meta's Role as a Follower Hard to Change

Meta held its first LlamaCon AI developer conference this Tuesday, launching a series of new products, including a standalone smartphone app for the Meta AI assistant and a preview of the Llama large language model API for developers.

However, at the conference, Meta failed to release the eagerly anticipated reasoning model Llama 4 Behemoth, described as "the most powerful mixed expert AI model trained on 2 trillion parameters," which was originally scheduled for release weeks ago but has been delayed multiple times.

Brownstone Research released a report stating that Meta "did not present enough substantial content" at the conference, clearly indicating its lagging position in the AI field.

The firm emphasized that the highly anticipated Llama 4 Behemoth model did not launch as expected, and the focus of Meta's release seemed more like an attempt to juggle both consumer and developer areas without making any breakthrough in either:

"Meta's conference was a complete failure. This sentiment is justified."

In contrast, competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and Mistral have already launched consumer-grade chatbot applications and enterprise API interfaces, while Meta has clearly been left behind.

Meta's "Open Source" Strategy Questioned, Insufficient Innovation Becomes a Concern

Meanwhile, Meta's "open source" strategy has come under serious scrutiny.

The Open Source Initiative, an authoritative organization in the open source software ecosystem, clearly stated that "the license for Llama LLM is clearly not an 'open source' license," and further demanded that Meta "correct its misstatements."

According to Brownstone Research's analysis, Meta's software is not truly open source, although it does provide the model weights and allows others to manipulate these weights, Meta does not allow Llama to be used for any purposes that violate human rights, does not allow the development of competing products, and does not allow training models exceeding 700 trillion parameters.

The firm pointed out that these restrictions are contrary to the true spirit of open source.

Meta's Capital Expenditure Increases Significantly, Continuing to Burn Money on "Gambling" AI

Faced with fierce competition and technological delays, Meta's choice is to continue pouring money into the venture.

In the financial report released on Wednesday, Meta announced a significant increase in its capital expenditure expectations for 2025, raising the upper limit by $7 billion compared to what was announced in January this year, in order to acquire computing power more quickly If Meta spends at the upper limit of its new forecast, this year's capital expenditure will be 84% higher than last year, a figure that is almost close to Google's spending level this year, even though Google is a much larger company than Meta in terms of revenue scale.

During the earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg expressed strong confidence in the future opportunities in the AI field and elaborated on how Meta has already been using AI to improve content recommendations and ad placements for its social media users.

Meta's ongoing investment in AI presents both opportunities and challenges for investors. On one hand, Meta's powerful distribution channels (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) give it a unique advantage. On the other hand, Meta's innovation capability in the AI field seems insufficient, lagging behind competitors.

With the delayed release of the Llama 4 Behemoth model and other technical delays, investors have reason to question Meta's strategy and execution in the AI field. Whether Meta can stand out in fierce competition and generate returns from its massive AI investments will be a focal point for investors in the future