Meta’s AI investment plan has backfired on Zuckerberg

It will write your WhatsApp messages for you. It will post a cute picture of your cat on Instagram, even if you don’t actually have a cat. And it will put some enhanced memories up for you on Facebook, while cheerfully making connections with people you don’t know and who may well not actually exist… When Mark Zuckerberg started explaining his plans for Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook – to start investing billions of dollars in Artificial Intelligence (AI) yesterday, investors should have been cheering all the lucrative possibilities. Instead, the share price has promptly sunk like a stone. The stock market has started to become suspicious of the AI hype – and rightly so. 

The best thing Zuckerberg could do when Meta’s next batch of quarterly results are announced is call in sick. The company churns out vast profits from its social media empire, serving up precision-targeted advertising whenever any of us go online.