Latest / In the Loop AI / Zuck's Open Source Playbook: Meta Muse Glimmer and 14-Page Manifesto
Transcript
- 0:00Josh: Meta has pivoted again for the third time and now back to an open source company.
- 0:05Josh: The story of Meta has been pretty insane.
- 0:07Josh: Two years ago they were totally open source, hellbent on wreaking havoc on the
- 0:12Josh: entire marketplace of closed source models.
- 0:14Josh: They were doing this through their model called Llama and for those who weren't
- 0:16Josh: familiar, Llama was just kind of like this close to frontier open source model
- 0:21Josh: that was expected to change the world in a meaningful way.
- 0:23Josh: It did not go as Zuck foresaw and therefore they went and they closed off all
- 0:28Josh: their model development and went closed source just like all of the other labs now
- 0:32Josh: they're going back they're transitioning back to open source and as a result
- 0:35Josh: they've spent a tremendous amount of money on this so what happened in the last
- 0:39Josh: earnings report after all the capex spend came in
- 0:41Josh: zuck just dropped a 14 page paper explaining exactly why they're making a re-entry
- 0:46Josh: into the open source world
- 0:48Josh: That entry is defined by a singular model that we're going to talk about right
- 0:51Josh: now called Muse Glimmer. And Muse Glimmer is a really impressive model that
- 0:55Josh: fits on your laptop, runs locally, and I think it's going to shift the world of open source AI.
- 1:01Ejaaz: I think this is a great move from Zuck and Meta. And this is coming from probably
- 1:06Ejaaz: the Meta's biggest bear in the past on this show.
- 1:10Josh: Yeah, definitely. We're professional haters. I should preface this with.
- 1:13Ejaaz: I'm a professional hair of Zuck and Meta for the last six months,
- 1:17Ejaaz: but I love to see this pivot.
- 1:18Ejaaz: And I'll explain why. Number one, Metz's entire philosophy around AI has always
- 1:24Ejaaz: been open source. And his simple reasoning behind that is he believes like everyone
- 1:28Ejaaz: should get access to this thing, right?
- 1:30Ejaaz: If everyone has access to this thing, there'll be no centralized core power
- 1:34Ejaaz: for AI. There's no AI overlord going forwards. He then kind of pivoted on that,
- 1:37Ejaaz: like you mentioned, and now he's back with not one, but two new open source
- 1:41Ejaaz: models. So what are the models?
- 1:43Ejaaz: Number one, the headline is called Muse Glimmer. It's an open-weight,
- 1:48Ejaaz: open-source, 30 billion parameter model.
- 1:51Ejaaz: Now, if you're not familiar with the sizes of these relative models,
- 1:54Ejaaz: this is a pretty tiny model.
- 1:56Ejaaz: It can actually fit and run on your MacBook. It's 20 gigabytes of data or RAM
- 2:01Ejaaz: that it requires, which is significantly smaller than any other frontier model,
- 2:04Ejaaz: which is like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes.
- 2:07Ejaaz: And the way that they were able to achieve this is they took a bigger model,
- 2:11Ejaaz: and they made it smaller. It's something called quantization.
- 2:14Ejaaz: Now, why did they create this model?
- 2:16Ejaaz: Well, he believes or Meta believes that locally run private AI models.
- 2:22Ejaaz: Should be the future of how AI models are dispersed amongst everyone.
- 2:25Ejaaz: Right now, we pay subscriptions to get access to a model that lives in the cloud,
- 2:30Ejaaz: that lives in a centralized company like Anthropic, like OpenAI.
- 2:33Ejaaz: With this model, you can kind of run it locally.
- 2:36Ejaaz: And that brings several different advantages that we've mentioned quite a few
- 2:39Ejaaz: times on this show. The first one being it's cheap as hell.
- 2:42Ejaaz: The second one being it can run on your private data, so it can become a lot
- 2:45Ejaaz: more smarter and attuned to you specifically.
- 2:49Ejaaz: And the third thing is it's very efficient when it serves you answers and results
- 2:54Ejaaz: to your different prompts. So I think it's a good model, but it's certainly not frontier in any way.
- 2:59Josh: Yeah, it's far from frontier. And I imagine they're probably not really concerned
- 3:02Josh: about that. We mentioned this on previous episodes where there is this fight
- 3:06Josh: for the frontier, but now there are different frontiers.
- 3:09Josh: There is the frontier of intelligence, which Anthropic and OpenAI are kind of
- 3:12Josh: working on. Then there's the frontier of cost and efficiency per token.
- 3:16Josh: That's kind of where I see meta of place in themselves. In fact,
- 3:19Josh: they're fighting on multiple fronts at once.
- 3:21Josh: And it seems like Muse Glimmer is sitting at the very base of that because it
- 3:25Josh: is such a small model, it's so quantized, it's able to actually run on a local machine.
- 3:29Josh: I think the fully capable largest version of this takes about 55 gigabytes of
- 3:34Josh: memory, which runs on my MacBook that I have sitting on my desk right now.
- 3:37Josh: And that's really impressive.
- 3:38Josh: This puts them in a race that not many other companies are competing on,
- 3:41Josh: which is just like that edge inference local compute thing that I think we can
- 3:46Josh: expect to see out of Apple Fairleague soon.
- 3:48Josh: Like with the new Siri going to be running on local models, this is very much
- 3:52Josh: feels like a response to that.
- 3:53Josh: Where now for the first time you're able to run this free inference that's fairly
- 3:57Josh: capable it has a somewhat large context window i believe a couple hundred thousand
- 4:02Josh: tokens i'm not sure the exact number but a couple hundred thousand
- 4:04Josh: Tokens of context it has you know pretty good outputs in terms of tokens per second
- 4:09Josh: and it runs at a level that you would expect a frontier model would have ran at
- 4:13Josh: maybe say 18 months ago so it's not going to do any crazy difficult complicated
- 4:17Josh: tasks but for something that can run on your machine you could use anywhere
- 4:21Josh: in the world at any given time and you can trust it to manage all of your data.
- 4:25Josh: So for example, if you have a machine runs a lot of sensitive information,
- 4:28Josh: you want to put health information through that, you might not want to give
- 4:32Josh: to a public facing model.
- 4:33Josh: This is a really easy way of doing that in a way that we haven't really had before.
- 4:37Josh: And I think that's kind of step one in this new strategy that Zuckerberg's going
- 4:41Josh: for in, I guess you could call it like scorched earth 2.0, where why do you
- 4:45Josh: open source models? Well, you want everyone to go off, build on them to remove
- 4:49Josh: margins away from these frontier labs.
- 4:51Josh: And this seems like the first version of that that people are are kind of
- 4:54Ejaaz: Excited about and you see him apply this logic to quite a few of his models
- 4:59Ejaaz: now like he also open weighted or he plans to open weight.
- 5:02Ejaaz: Muse spark 1.2 which if you have been following along with the show
- 5:07Ejaaz: was a brand new model metas frontier model that they released i think it was
- 5:11Ejaaz: like a week and a half ago and what made muse spark 1.2 really special is it's a really good
- 5:17Ejaaz: coding model in the way that they've kind of engineered AI agents to kind of
- 5:20Ejaaz: like replicate amongst themselves,
- 5:22Ejaaz: take your code and go work in parallel.
- 5:25Ejaaz: So it's a really efficient way of working. And that's kind of like Meta's core
- 5:29Ejaaz: thesis, I feel, with a lot of these models that they're releasing.
- 5:31Ejaaz: It's like they're not trying to get the most intelligent model,
- 5:34Ejaaz: but they're trying to produce the most cheapest and affordable model that still
- 5:38Ejaaz: gets about 90 to 95% of the work done.
- 5:41Ejaaz: And Zuck has said in many times over the last couple of months that this is
- 5:44Ejaaz: Meta's core philosophy. They believe that locally private-run,
- 5:47Ejaaz: effective AI models will eventually outcompete the frontier. Now.
- 5:51Ejaaz: When you kind of compare these models, right, you're probably listening to this
- 5:54Ejaaz: and you're thinking, okay, who cares? Meta has a model. I haven't used Meta
- 5:56Ejaaz: AI intelligence in God knows how long.
- 5:58Ejaaz: Why should I use this model? Well, if you are using, say, the Anthropic or OpenAI
- 6:03Ejaaz: API and you're spending a couple thousand bucks a month, even a couple hundred
- 6:06Ejaaz: bucks a month, if you're an enterprise that's spending 10 to hundreds of millions of dollars per year,
- 6:11Ejaaz: this might be a model that might be more bang for your buck.
- 6:13Ejaaz: And listen, you're not going to use it for everything. You're not going to get
- 6:15Ejaaz: it to plan your entire company strategy.
- 6:17Ejaaz: You're not going to get it to build a brand new app from scratch and expect
- 6:21Ejaaz: it to be the best thing, but you'll use it as a workhorse, maybe in conjunction
- 6:25Ejaaz: with some of these more intelligent models.
- 6:27Ejaaz: So it's great to see Zuck kind of like reprise Meta's role in open source.
- 6:32Ejaaz: If we remember, like in the past, it was Lama and then he kind of like pivoted
- 6:35Ejaaz: and everyone was like kind of super angry about this. I'm glad that he's doing this.
- 6:39Ejaaz: The question is like, why is he doing this, right? Like, you know,
- 6:43Ejaaz: why would this make sense for Meta, which is a for-profit publicly traded company,
- 6:46Ejaaz: he sucks, still wants to make a lot of money.
- 6:48Ejaaz: How does this make any sense at all? And he kind of dropped his entire thesis
- 6:52Ejaaz: yesterday when he announced that he's open weighting a bunch of these models.
- 6:56Ejaaz: He goes, I believe everyone should have access to super intelligence.
- 7:00Ejaaz: And I wrote a long piece about Meta's philosophy and values for building that world.
- 7:05Ejaaz: And essentially like this future that he describes balances on like three core
- 7:09Ejaaz: pillars. Number one is he believes everyone should be individually empowered,
- 7:13Ejaaz: aka get access to their own private AI model and that it shouldn't be centered
- 7:17Ejaaz: in specific frontier AI labs.
- 7:19Ejaaz: Number two, he believes the thing that pushes humanity going forwards is invention.
- 7:23Ejaaz: So humans' ability and intention to invent brand new things should drive who
- 7:28Ejaaz: gets access to these different models. And that could be anyone and everyone.
- 7:31Ejaaz: And the third thing is he just believes in a core balance of power,
- 7:34Ejaaz: which is something ironically that adversaries over in China have been advocating
- 7:39Ejaaz: for a while now. So it's nice to see like a frontier American AI lab advocate for the same.
- 7:44Josh: It is, but it feels a little bit like I can't, I can't feel like this is a high
- 7:49Josh: conviction post because the sentiment has changed so much.
- 7:52Josh: It's not like he's like they started this way, but then they changed this way
- 7:55Josh: when it wasn't working. And now that things are working, they're going to go
- 7:58Josh: back and start to believe this. It feels like they're just not really standing strong.
- 8:01Josh: On morals over time and this this could be the wrong guess but i mean he's he's
- 8:06Josh: here saying basically the exact arguments that everyone's been arguing for a
- 8:09Josh: very long time it's like we don't trust a single monoculture to handle this
- 8:12Josh: we don't believe that the future of humanity is going to be
- 8:16Josh: best served by two to three companies we we don't believe that any company who
- 8:20Josh: thinks that ai will eliminate most jobs would rush to build it faster than anyone
- 8:25Josh: else and these are the arguments that we've heard for a really long time and
- 8:28Josh: we just get these echoed over and over again
- 8:31Josh: as the company starts to fit more of this mold i mean the essay was interesting
- 8:35Josh: what i will be most interested in is just seeing what the actual downstream effects are of
- 8:40Josh: these new essays and like hopefully it seems like zuck is getting more confident
- 8:44Josh: that they're going to figure this out that they're going to actually be releasing
- 8:46Josh: models that can meaningfully
- 8:48Josh: shift the way people engage with ai and this is probably like the starting gun
- 8:53Josh: he's like hey new era new company new ethos we're going to start running with
- 8:57Josh: this and see how it goes and so far it looks like they're kind of on their way
- 9:01Josh: like things are pretty good i was looking at
- 9:03Josh: Muse glimmer and i actually i want to try this one so my plan is to install
- 9:06Josh: this on my local machine today and give it a go
- 9:08Josh: because one of the things that is unique about this one is for people who are
- 9:11Josh: still using open claw remember that thing um this actually is a very agentic
- 9:15Josh: model that runs end-to-end for task completion
- 9:18Josh: it uses agents it has tool use it has multi-step reasoning it has multimodal
- 9:23Josh: input and output it seems like a really strong and powerful model yeah we could
- 9:27Josh: see here kind of how good it is at creating visuals, how good it is in benchmarks.
- 9:30Josh: And it's an actually usable model in a way that I don't think a lot of these
- 9:34Josh: others have been. So I'm taking this 14 page paper with a grain of salt. I...
- 9:38Josh: Read some of it. I didn't get my way through all of it. EJS,
- 9:41Josh: I know you said you read the entire thing.
- 9:43Josh: I'm excited for Meta. I want them to win. So I'm hoping this is the new starting
- 9:47Josh: point for them to release better models, to really get back in the game,
- 9:51Josh: to compete. Because, I mean, yeah, duopolies are less than ideal.
- 9:54Josh: We want a lot of people competing for a lot of different parts of the pie.
- 9:57Josh: And if Meta is going to come out here and do it and do so open source,
- 10:00Josh: that's great. And you got to imagine Jensen sitting over here pretty happy too, Mr.
- 10:04Josh: Open Source King, that now there's another company in the running for making
- 10:08Josh: really compelling open source models in the United States.
- 10:10Ejaaz: I think it's actions over words, though. Zuck has talked this talk for a while, you're right.
- 10:14Ejaaz: But he's also the guy that's releasing like the frontier open source models in America.
- 10:19Ejaaz: You see all the other AI labs. Look, I'll give you an example here.
- 10:22Ejaaz: Satya Nadella, bunch of people signed that they're in favor of open source and
- 10:26Ejaaz: open weight movements in general, but they haven't released any frontier open models themselves. So
- 10:31Ejaaz: I look at actions over words and Zuck, yeah, he's flailed around quite a bit.
- 10:35Ejaaz: And I've been a big critique of that, but he's come back.
- 10:39Ejaaz: And I'm going to judge him by his actions going forwards and we'll see what
- 10:42Ejaaz: he actually uses this for.
- 10:43Ejaaz: Now, the bad case for this is this is like an old school business move that
- 10:49Ejaaz: he's making, which is let's flood the market with intelligence that is basically free.
- 10:54Ejaaz: So we commoditize the paid subscriptions that other frontier labs are paying for.
- 11:00Ejaaz: And that brings down their value, that brings down their profit margins,
- 11:04Ejaaz: their revenue, and it allows Meta more time to catch up. Now,
- 11:08Ejaaz: is this a costly and risky endeavor? Yes.
- 11:11Ejaaz: Meta has burned, what is it, like $30 billion in acquiring 150 staff to produce
- 11:17Ejaaz: a model that is sub-frontier. If you were a shareholder, you're probably looking
- 11:21Ejaaz: at this and thinking, Zuck, what are you doing?
- 11:23Ejaaz: But if you look at what he's been investing in outside of that.
- 11:27Ejaaz: I think he's on track to spend, I think, $210 billion this year through the
- 11:33Ejaaz: first half of next year on Datacenter CapEx.
- 11:37Ejaaz: He is one of the largest holders of NVIDIA GPUs. He's secured like one of the
- 11:42Ejaaz: largest arsenals of NVIDIA Rubins, which is their next-gen GPU architecture.
- 11:48Ejaaz: Second only to Elon Musk, you have to question, okay, what's he going to use
- 11:52Ejaaz: all of this compute for? Well, he could rent it out, which is what SpaceX is
- 11:55Ejaaz: doing and make a bag from that.
- 11:57Ejaaz: But he's also probably going to train a bunch of frontier models.
- 11:59Ejaaz: And the biggest signal for whether he's actually going to be able to pull this
- 12:03Ejaaz: off is model release cadence.
- 12:05Ejaaz: And in the last, I think 90 days, he's released two models, but he's going to
- 12:11Ejaaz: release another two more over the next, I think it's like one to two months.
- 12:15Ejaaz: I think you mentioned in some tweet thread, Elon Musk is planning to do the same.
- 12:18Ejaaz: So I'm seeing this trend where the companies that, even though they're a little
- 12:22Ejaaz: bit behind in frontier intelligence, who have the most compute,
- 12:25Ejaaz: who have the most capital, are still able to kind of ship models iteratively
- 12:29Ejaaz: and maybe respond to the market quicker than some of these other frontier labs. Now,
- 12:32Ejaaz: I appreciate that that's optimistic thinking, but I do think Zuck is back in
- 12:36Ejaaz: the game and I'm excited to see what these models are like. I want to play around
- 12:40Ejaaz: with this Muse Spark 1.2 and this new one that I can run on my laptop and see
- 12:45Ejaaz: what fun things we can come up with.
- 12:47Josh: Yeah, I was trying to unpack the reasoning. I'm like, okay, why did he make
- 12:50Josh: this pivot again? It seems like there's so much uncertainty in the strategy of meta so far.
- 12:55Josh: And there really does appear to be some pretty compelling reasons that are kind
- 12:59Josh: of underlying this decision.
- 13:01Josh: Because when you think about meta the company i was like okay what does meta
- 13:03Josh: actually do meta is just an attention salesman
- 13:06Josh: their biggest part of the business is advertising and sales through that
- 13:09Josh: all their services are mostly free to use you can pay for a blue check mark if you want
- 13:13Josh: but most their users are free and they have this tremendous user base so they
- 13:17Josh: can sell a subscription to those people but those people are not used to and
- 13:22Josh: not very probably likely excited to pay
- 13:24Josh: twenty dollars a month to use an ai system that can be offered for free because
- 13:28Josh: you have to assume the average user doesn't need frontier class intelligence
- 13:31Josh: so if the model is attention
- 13:34Josh: And if you can improve your core business through AI, then that's probably what
- 13:38Josh: they want to do. And that's probably why open source makes sense.
- 13:41Josh: I mean, yeah, meta already announced it wants to use your AI chats to personalize the ads
- 13:46Josh: and it wants you to use the AI to build a large profile on you, to build
- 13:50Josh: a josh.md, an ejaz.md that has all of our preferences, all the things we care
- 13:55Josh: about, that gets updated in real time, and that has an increasing amount of
- 13:59Josh: ways in which you can collect context on you.
- 14:02Josh: And if you are trying to do this then you really just want these models to be
- 14:05Josh: free and accessible and open to collect as much data as possible to feel like
- 14:08Josh: there is no friction to getting in the game and then also just to kind of like just chip away at the
- 14:14Josh: the frontier labs margins where if there's someone who is deciding between a
- 14:17Josh: 20 model or just going into their instagram app and using this cool new chatbot
- 14:22Josh: that they have like chances are a lot of people are going to choose to use the
- 14:25Josh: chatbot and that puts them
- 14:26Josh: in a way i guess it's kind of unique to them where they're they're competing
- 14:30Josh: on edge inference in a way somewhat with apple and what they will be doing with
- 14:33Josh: the new siri but they're also competing with google in the ads business if
- 14:37Josh: they're going to have just as much if not more data than google has
- 14:42Josh: When it comes to search queries and like think about how custom the advertising
- 14:45Josh: can be and not even advertising but content creation in general if meta understands
- 14:50Josh: what type of content you like how you engage with certain types of content it
- 14:53Josh: can serve this very custom profile that allows custom generated content just
- 14:57Josh: for you all in the effort of selling you more ads.
- 15:00Josh: And I think this is the reality of Meta is as they've tried to pivot to hardware,
- 15:03Josh: they've done all these other exploratory things.
- 15:05Josh: It still just comes down to the core business is selling people ads.
- 15:09Josh: And it's like understanding who their user is, pairing them with a seller and
- 15:12Josh: collecting commission off of those sales.
- 15:15Josh: And I think this is probably just a natural extension of that.
- 15:17Josh: And they're going to continue to make these products more compelling and more
- 15:22Josh: capable through these very lightweight AI models.
- 15:24Ejaaz: At the end of the day, Meta is obviously a for-profit company.
- 15:29Ejaaz: They're trying to make money and ads, as you said, is like their main business.
- 15:32Ejaaz: So, you know, they're definitely going to focus on that.
- 15:35Ejaaz: But I also think in the wider market of AI, a bunch of things have shifted recently
- 15:40Ejaaz: that we just can't ignore.
- 15:41Ejaaz: The first one being, you don't need the most intelligent model to do anything
- 15:46Ejaaz: and everything for you. I was catching up with a friend who is pretty high up
- 15:49Ejaaz: at a top, I would say, Fortune 100 company.
- 15:53Ejaaz: And I asked him, like, you know, how are you using AI these days?
- 15:56Ejaaz: Like, do you use private models? Do you use the standard models from Anthropic and OpenAI?
- 16:02Ejaaz: And he said, I've shifted completely to some of these open source models,
- 16:06Ejaaz: as well as just cheaper models in general.
- 16:08Ejaaz: And I get it to do the bulk of my work whilst I use Accord or GPT 5.6 to brainstorm
- 16:14Ejaaz: kind of like the architecture of what I want to build.
- 16:16Ejaaz: And I'm seeing this pattern reflected across a number of different enterprises.
- 16:20Ejaaz: It's certainly been reported across social media like every single day.
- 16:23Ejaaz: We're seeing the shift of companies thinking, I'm not going to just needlessly
- 16:27Ejaaz: spend a bunch of money on frontier intelligence. I certainly will for some things,
- 16:31Ejaaz: but I want to explore some of the cheaper options, right? And you can look at
- 16:34Ejaaz: the business models of the frontier labs themselves, right?
- 16:37Ejaaz: I think over the last 90 days, eight models have been released,
- 16:41Ejaaz: three of them alone from OpenAI, right? Why didn't they just release GPT-5.6
- 16:46Ejaaz: Sol? Why did they release Luna? Why did they release Terra?
- 16:49Ejaaz: Why did they slash the price of Luna by 80% a month ago? Why did Anthropic yesterday,
- 16:56Ejaaz: I think, announce that they're going to keep Claude Sonnet, I believe,
- 17:01Ejaaz: at the cheapest price ever indefinitely.
- 17:03Ejaaz: I think these companies are realizing that cheaper models are definitely applicable
- 17:07Ejaaz: and have an advantageous incentive for the customers that they're trying to
- 17:11Ejaaz: sell to, whether it's enterprises or consumer customers.
- 17:14Ejaaz: And you need more bang for your buck. Zuck realizes this, and he's seizing the
- 17:19Ejaaz: opportunity, but he's being more aggressive with the open source side of things.
- 17:22Ejaaz: And I think Zuck has enough capital at Meta to be able to keep this train going
- 17:26Ejaaz: for a while now. So I'm interested to see how what meta and specifically SpaceX
- 17:32Ejaaz: looks like over the next couple of months.
- 17:34Ejaaz: I think SpaceX is also teasing their next model and they've released like two
- 17:38Ejaaz: over the last like three weeks today, which should hopefully be releasing.
- 17:41Ejaaz: But yeah, I think there's something that
- 17:44Ejaaz: they're going to pull off something cool.
- 17:45Josh: Yeah i'm looking forward to it i'm looking forward to all the agents that they're
- 17:49Josh: going to spawn from these new models because if you are working with agents
- 17:51Josh: you know you know who we got to talk about and that's ledger our sponsor of
- 17:55Josh: this episode um because they have this infrastructure for agents in which it's kind of three parts
- 18:00Josh: agents propose then the human approves and then
- 18:03Josh: the ledger signer enforces the ledger signer is this mostly comes in the form
- 18:07Josh: of a hardware wallet in which you can approve or deny we talk a lot about security
- 18:11Josh: and how a lot of these agents can kind of go rogue and do things you may not want
- 18:14Josh: ledger offers an agent stack which is a series of open source tools that allows you to
- 18:19Josh: evaluate what these agents are doing across the way you could tell it to do
- 18:23Josh: things like rebalance your wallet
- 18:24Josh: or adjust whatever parameters you want to adjust and then it will propose you
- 18:29Josh: approve and the ledger signer enforces it works with cloud code
- 18:31Josh: codex all of the places that you work with ai on a daily basis so thank you
- 18:36Josh: so much to ledger for sponsoring this part of the episode you can get their
- 18:39Josh: products at the link in the description below.
- 18:41Josh: EJS, you mentioned capex spend, or you actually didn't mention capex spend.
- 18:45Josh: You mentioned strong earnings, but I'm going to mention capex spend,
- 18:48Josh: which is their free cashflow.
- 18:51Josh: Like we have to talk about the earnings quickly because like we do want to get
- 18:54Josh: a little bit economic here. Like how viable is this strategy?
- 18:56Josh: Their free cashflow this year, which means basically the money that comes in
- 18:59Josh: and out is down 91% year over year.
- 19:04Josh: They're spending, They're spending big on a few key pillars.
- 19:08Josh: One of them is this open source bet, which does not have an immediate ROI because,
- 19:12Josh: I mean, again, they're offering these weights for free.
- 19:14Josh: The other is on their hardware platform. One of the things that is like still
- 19:19Josh: shocking to me, and I'm not sure that many people know about this,
- 19:22Josh: Meta owns 70 to 80% of the entire AI glasses market.
- 19:27Josh: And this is not a big market, but this is a market that is meaningful and that
- 19:31Josh: probably shouldn't be overlooked.
- 19:34Josh: This is done exclusively with a company named Luxottica. Together,
- 19:37Josh: they have more than tripled Meta's AI glasses sales just in the year of 2025.
- 19:42Josh: We haven't gotten 2026 numbers yet, but like that is kind of noteworthy it's interesting to see the
- 19:48Josh: floor of the capex guidance being raised too in 2026 meta is guiding for 145
- 19:56Josh: billion dollars of spend which is just this like unfathomably large number
- 20:01Josh: and when you think about the places that it's going to land well it's certainly
- 20:04Josh: open source it's certainly hardware but like what else are they really just
- 20:08Josh: going to go all in on building out data centers and gpus to make larger models is that
- 20:13Josh: is that the end game? Because I don't see them competing on the frontier.
- 20:17Josh: So do they really need that much compute in order to compete for open source, open weight models?
- 20:22Ejaaz: I think so. I think the number one factor that determines how good your AI offering is, is compute.
- 20:29Ejaaz: At the end of the day, Elon's going to prove that with SpaceX.
- 20:31Ejaaz: And I think Zuck is planning to do the same thing.
- 20:34Ejaaz: We saw NVIDIA or Jensen Huang announced yesterday that he secured an additional
- 20:39Ejaaz: $500 billion of revenue and capital investment for future compute.
- 20:44Ejaaz: We see OpenAI partnering with NVIDIA for a similar amount, half a trillion dollars.
- 20:49Ejaaz: You see Anthropic securing deals with Riot yesterday with an old cryptographic
- 20:53Ejaaz: mining company to secure even more compute.
- 20:55Ejaaz: Compute is the ultimate indicator on whether you can create a better model.
- 20:58Ejaaz: It is the one thing that is consistent across all competitors in the AI race.
- 21:02Ejaaz: And I think Zuck believes if he amasses enough of it, if he secures enough allocation
- 21:06Ejaaz: of frontier NVIDIA GPUs, he'll be able to pull off and build better models.
- 21:12Ejaaz: Now, whether the open source strategy plays out, again, it's that strategy that
- 21:15Ejaaz: I think I mentioned earlier, which is flood the market with commoditized intelligence,
- 21:20Ejaaz: cut down or cut into revenue and margins of your competitors.
- 21:24Ejaaz: Yeah, Meta's CapEx takes a beating in the short term, but hopefully that plays
- 21:29Ejaaz: better in the long term when you have personalized agents that all run on Meta's
- 21:32Ejaaz: infrastructure and consumer apps.
- 21:34Ejaaz: Also, remember, Meta has like 4 billion consumers right now.
- 21:37Ejaaz: I was scrolling on Reels yesterday, which I don't like to admit,
- 21:41Ejaaz: but a ton of them are now Meta glasses.
- 21:44Ejaaz: I don't know if you've seen this, Josh, but it's this POV from a bunch of different people.
- 21:48Ejaaz: And I think that they don't have the best hardware, but they have one of the
- 21:51Ejaaz: most amazing distributions ever. I think 4 billion, and then you compare that
- 21:55Ejaaz: to Apple, which has, I think, 3.5 billion live Apple devices right now.
- 21:59Ejaaz: It's probably a lot more. I think that data is outdated.
- 22:01Ejaaz: They have a real competing moat here. And I look at Google, who has recently
- 22:06Ejaaz: gone into negative cash flow. Meta isn't quite there yet.
- 22:09Ejaaz: So you could argue that they're being somewhat conservative.
- 22:12Ejaaz: They have other businesses that are earning a ton of money that can support this for a while, but,
- 22:16Ejaaz: They don't have infinite runway. And, you know, maybe we'll see Meta raising
- 22:19Ejaaz: external capital similar to how Intel and Google has over the last couple of
- 22:23Ejaaz: months. I don't know. We'll see.
- 22:25Josh: Yeah. And I was going to ask the question whether or not this CapEx spend is
- 22:28Josh: existential. Like what happens if they fail again?
- 22:31Josh: Because this isn't their first time trying to get a frontier model that works
- 22:34Josh: really well and the first time did not go as planned. And then I was thinking, well, you know what?
- 22:39Josh: At least they have the GPUs and they could just go resell those and make a great business out of it.
- 22:42Josh: So there's this really weird part of the market now where it's very advantageous
- 22:46Josh: to just spend money on building data centers. And even if you can't figure out
- 22:49Josh: how to use them yourself, you just sell them off to the next best guy and you
- 22:52Josh: can make a tremendous amount of money from that infrastructure build out.
- 22:55Josh: So I think at the very least, you could find a lot of solace in that idea in
- 22:58Josh: terms of users. Like that's a great point that, I mean, 4 billion users is half of the planet.
- 23:02Josh: There's not many companies in the world that I'm not sure if there's any companies
- 23:06Josh: in the world with that quite as many users as meta, or there's a very small handful of them.
- 23:10Josh: So if they're able to figure out how to, I mean, weaponize is like a terrible
- 23:14Josh: word for this, but like able to leverage their AI tools to further create compelling
- 23:20Josh: offerings on their social media platforms, like that's a pretty big value unlock.
- 23:23Josh: So I'm excited. I'm cautiously optimistic on meta.
- 23:27Josh: Like I'm still looking for signals that they are going to figure it out.
- 23:30Josh: But like you mentioned, when you're watching reels, a lot of it are coming from
- 23:33Josh: the glasses. It's this novel form of creating content. It's this cool new paradigm
- 23:36Josh: that every other company is working for. And right now, I mean,
- 23:39Josh: say what you want, like they are in the lead.
- 23:41Josh: It's maybe not the best piece of hardware in the world, but they have the best one available.
- 23:44Josh: And we'll see what happens with the company. But that's kind of the update.
- 23:49Josh: Meta is going open source again. The boys are back and they are spending a lot
- 23:53Josh: of money and they are very clearly hellbent on making the best open source models
- 23:57Josh: that they can and implementing them.
- 24:00Josh: Across the entire product stack while continuing to iterate on their hardware
- 24:03Josh: products and weird science projects like remember the the pupil dilation tracker
- 24:07Josh: and like the this brainwave scanner that they're using to like understand how content affects you and
- 24:13Josh: it's going to be a weird future with meta but they're working on it nonetheless
- 24:17Josh: full speed ahead and um yeah we'll just continue to cover it as we go along this journey here
- 24:22Ejaaz: Also i will just say this if you're listening to this episode and you are a
- 24:27Ejaaz: builder, there has never been a better time to be alive.
- 24:31Ejaaz: Like all these tools, all these models, all these products that are being released
- 24:35Ejaaz: over the last couple of months that are being increased in frequency are all
- 24:39Ejaaz: for you to trial test out.
- 24:41Ejaaz: If it's too expensive for you to buy a Claude Mac subscription,
- 24:44Ejaaz: play around with some of these open source models. If you don't think that the
- 24:47Ejaaz: American frontier open source models are good enough, play around with some
- 24:49Ejaaz: of these open weight or open source Chinese models.
- 24:52Ejaaz: There is no excuse to not be using these things.
- 24:56Ejaaz: If you have access to it, if you have a project or a hobby or an idea in your
- 25:00Ejaaz: mind, go out there, try these things that we're talking about and honestly give
- 25:04Ejaaz: us feedback because we'd love to hear from builders to see what you guys are
- 25:07Ejaaz: actually doing with the thing.
- 25:08Ejaaz: Maybe we're missing something and maybe you can kind of like shine a light on
- 25:11Ejaaz: something that we're completely missing.
- 25:13Ejaaz: But we will be covering anything and everything on Limitless going forwards.
- 25:17Ejaaz: That is the end of this episode. You're all caught up on all of things meta
- 25:22Ejaaz: related. They've done a pivot.
- 25:23Ejaaz: They've turned it around and I'm excited to see where the company is in a couple months' time.
- 25:28Ejaaz: That being said, wherever you're listening to us, if it's on YouTube and you
- 25:31Ejaaz: aren't subscribed, if the notifications aren't turned on, please do so.
- 25:34Ejaaz: It helps us out massively.
- 25:36Ejaaz: If you haven't left us a comment on Spotify, Apple Music, or even YouTube as
- 25:39Ejaaz: well, please do so. We have been loving the comments, by the way. I think we've
- 25:43Ejaaz: gotten in the in the realm of like i don't know it's like a thousand two thousand
- 25:48Ejaaz: plus comments over the last like five episodes keep them coming we love hearing
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- 25:54Ejaaz: as soon as we have like free time available um and then yeah we have a newsletter
- 25:57Ejaaz: that goes out to over a hundred thousand of you we post twice a week i think
- 26:00Ejaaz: this week we getting three times because josh and i can't keep our gobs shut
- 26:03Ejaaz: but um josh anything anything well and most.
- 26:06Josh: Most of all don't forget to gift this to a friend if there's someone else who
- 26:11Josh: you know that would benefit from watching this every single day who wakes up
- 26:14Josh: in the morning goes up with a little walk for their dog or like on their morning
- 26:17Josh: commute that wants something to listen to 25 minutes long that will get sometimes
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- 26:24Josh: it's always much appreciated it's how we grow the best so as always thank you
- 26:27Josh: so much for making it to the end of the episode real ones only here at the conclusion
- 26:31Josh: thank you for watching and we will see you in the next episode