Topic

META

A collection of 85 issues

License to Chase the AI Frontier

While looking at Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, I was quite struck by what they all have in common. The top model developers except one all have one thing in common: they are all currently founder-led companies. Alphabet is the sole exception. But even in Alphabet’s case, the company

Digital Advertising Industry Snapshot 2Q'26

As I do after every quarter, let me share the snapshot of the overall digital advertising industry. Let me first explain some changes for this quarter’s edition. First of all, digital advertising industry is defined as Alphabet’s advertising revenue+ Meta’s advertising revenue+ Snap’s ad revenue+ Pinterest

Meta's "True" ROIC, and Some Notes from Meta and Alphabet's 10-Qs

Over the weekend, I realized that the way I was calculating Meta’s ROIC somehow masked its “true” ROIC. So, I updated my process around calculating its ROIC and wanted to share the updated number since it is noticeably different from the one I shared earlier and I think reflects

Meta 2Q'26: Not Amazing, Not Bad, and Still Compelling

2Q’26 wasn’t the quarter that propelled Meta out of the penalty box. While revenue came ahead of estimates, operating earnings fell short due to one-off expenses such as legal and severance related costs. I believe market was smart enough to see through that, so it’s the

WhatsApp's New Era

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced a surprising leadership change in WhatsApp. Will Cathcart, who led WhatsApp since 2019, was replaced by Kunal Shah, an India-based serial entrepreneur. Just before joining WhatsApp, Shah was running CRED, an Indian fintech platform that rewards members with a high credit score for timely

Meta On the Offense!

This week has turned out to be a plethora of model launches with SpaceX releasing Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, and Meta and OpenAI releasing Muse Spark 1.1 and GPT-5.6 yesterday. While Meta has been on the news almost on a daily basis these days with admittedly

The Salience of Data

Let me begin with a thought experiment. Imagine you know nothing about OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s financials. No ARR figures, and no valuation marks from the latest round. Now add one more condition, and it may be less hypothetical than it sounds: assume every frontier lab has access to

Why Consumer AI Appears to be Lagging Enterprise

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg internally shared that AI agents haven’t progressed as fast as he hoped. While initially many interpreted this as Meta specific stumble on their agentic AI efforts in consumer, Alexandr Wang later clarified that Zuckerberg was talking about “the industry’s progress on agentic capabilities on

Scale Without Sluggishness

Meta's Myriad Questions

A couple of days ago, “SouthernValue” tagged me in the below tweet: Can we get a @borrowed_ideas and @evrgn11112231 podcast or spaces to discuss $META state of affairs? New regulation, AI model delays, internal chaos, tokenmaxxing then unmaxxing, agentic business prospects, Neocloud prospects (and willingness / timing) … lots to discuss.