Meta’s AI bet is paying off after the metaverse

Meta spent years and more than $80B chasing the metaverse.

Then Zuckerberg decided AI mattered more, hired aggressively, brought in Alexandr Wang and rebuilt the company’s AI effort around a new team.

Now Muse is growing fast, and Meta has added more than $200B in market value since its launch.

Big companies can look stuck right up until someone decides they aren’t.

For years, Zuckerberg’s biggest bet was the metaverse. Then Meta changed direction.

Reality Labs had already burned through tens of billions of dollars.

By 2025, Zuckerberg was increasingly focused on another race: AI.

Then came a $14.3B deal that would bring Alexandr Wang into Meta.

The cost of the metaverse bet

Meta’s Reality Labs has racked up more than $85B in operating losses since late 2020.

In 2025 alone, the division lost $19.2B while generating just $2.2B in revenue.

For years, Zuckerberg kept spending on VR, AR and the metaverse despite huge losses.

Then Meta had another problem

By 2025, Meta was also falling behind in AI.

Llama 4, released in April 2025, underwhelmed developers and drew criticism for entering a leaderboard with a specially tuned version. Key staff were leaving, and rivals were moving faster.

But his biggest move was a $14.3 billion deal for Scale AI

Meta reportedly paid $14.3B for a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI in June 2025.

A major part of the deal was bringing founder Alexandr Wang into Meta to lead its new superintelligence group.

He was 28 years old.

This was the person Zuckerberg put in charge

Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT, co-founded Scale AI at 19 and became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 25.

After the Meta deal, he stepped down as Scale’s CEO and took charge of Meta’s superintelligence effort.

So Zuckerberg went on one of Silicon Valley’s biggest AI hiring sprees.

Meta brought in more than 50 researchers and engineers, most of them from rivals.

Wired reported that some offers reached $300M over four years; Meta called those figures untrue. Zuckerberg personally courted top AI talent.

Then Muse hit

According to Meta, Wang’s lab rebuilt its AI stack from the ground up in nine months. On September 8, Meta launched Muse, an AI agent that can send emails, shop and book travel.

Apptopia estimates it reached 2.8M downloads in the U.S. and Canada in its first 12 days.

And the early numbers explain why investors are paying attention

Apptopia says Muse reached 1.8M iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada in its first 12 days, compared with 1.3M for ChatGPT over the same period and markets.

That puts Muse ahead of ChatGPT’s early mobile launch. Still, ChatGPT’s iOS app was U.S.-only in its first days, so the comparison may tilt slightly in Muse’s favor.

Then came the $200 billion number

Meta shares climbed more than 20% in the two weeks after Muse launched. On September 21 alone, they jumped 11%, adding roughly $200B to Meta’s market value.

The rally was driven by Muse’s fast growth and expectations that it could become a major new business for Meta. A Wells Fargo price-target increase also triggered that day’s jump.