A Leading Indicator Has Emerged Suggesting That the AI Industry Is Cooked

In the world of cultural commentary, there are plenty of benchmarks used to determine when a trend is on its deathbed.

From the classic shark-jumping episode of "Happy Days" to the adoption of Facebook by grandparents the world around, those with their ears to the ground can spot when a craze is on its way out. In that vein, the news that Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build supercharged AI sure strikes us as bad news for that industry.

Let's take it back a few years to the fall of 2021. As America reopened its restaurants and bars to a populace cooped up for a year during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the longtime virtual reality enthusiast experienced a paradigm shift of his own — one in which being immersed in digital worlds became so compelling an idea, he decided to sink billions upon billions of dollars into making it epic.

Thusly, the CEO and founder of Facebook announced just before the Halloween of 2021 that he was changing the company's name to Meta, so better to associate his multi-platform conglomerate with the new metaverse he was trying to create.

The rest, as they say, is history.

After spending a whopping $45 billion dollars on the world's most expensive fool's errand and making himself look very, very goofy in the process, little remains of Zuck's outrageously failed bet on the small-m metaverse save for the company's name. By the start of 2024, he'd identified a different hobby on which to spend billions of dollars: artificial intelligence, which at that time was still new and shiny thanks to OpenAI's release of ChatGPT just a bit prior.

With his metaverse dreams in the rear-view, the early-40s tech founder delivered the death knell to his expensive VR gambit by firing many of the staffers at Meta's Reality Labs division, Zuckerberg completed his transition from the company's nerdy "metamate-in-chief" to the designer t-shirt edgelord bent on beating OpenAI at its own game.

Most recently, we learned that Zuckerberg is not only launching a "superintelligence" lab and picking off OpenAI talent like flies, but also reportedly paying the people he's poaching up to $100 million a head as a signing bonus — and that's just in the first year, according to insiders who spoke to Wired.

With at least eight OpenAI staffers jumping ship for Meta's greener pastures, that would bring the total spent on signing bonuses for superintelligence lab researchers alone at $800 million — and that's not counting the untold sums Zuckerberg has already spent on AI chips, or the $65 billion he plans to throw at building out AI infrastructure in the near future.

As Meta and many other companies have found over the past few years, trying to play catch-up with OpenAI is a lot like the average person trying to win a footrace against Usain Bolt: not only are you going to lose spectacularly, but you're going to embarrass yourself while doing so.

As with any new technology, there are early adopters and those who arrive late to the party. Zuckerberg clearly falls squarely in the latter category — and his delayed entry into the AI game, paired with his ability to direct ungodly sums towards his whims, make us wonder if the party may soon be over.

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