I was never really sold their acquihire of Alexandr Wang as their head of AI being a coherent strategic decision. I just don’t see how his experience and background actually applies for frontier LLM model building.

I think there would easily be a few other hundred engineers and execs at frontier labs who are more in the loop for cutting edge architecture/secret sauce - with a track record of actually doing it - that could be had for a fraction of the price.

From the outside Meta's attempts to pivot from open source releases to fast follow closed models fell flat when they tried to prematurely monetize it. They could have owned the open weight model world but tried to pivot to closed weight chatbots before an actually viable revenue model appeared.