Spending $15B is a risk. Yes they have the money, but we're talking a quarter of Meta's annual income. That's not nothing.
And money concerns aside, Meta needs to be a major player in AI. If they have made the wrong bet with Scale AI & Wang then the company will suffer in the long term.
Honest question, why do they so existentially need to be a major player in AI? It's a social network that connects people, serves UGC and some spam/ads, and sells advertisement. Same but with photos for IG, same but with messages for Whatsap. Which part of this will die without AI? If they are obsessed with chatting with an AI bot on Whatsapp, just plug in grok or openai like Telegram, is that the killer feature worth bazillions of dollars?
(everything else seems like a failed experiment, VR, Libra, Facebook phone, whatever, nobody even remembers half these things)
You're thinking in the wrong scale. Meta is a $1.7T company, for them a $15B investment is less than 1% of the company. In the span of a year, this is negligible money.
And money concerns aside, Meta needs to be a major player in AI. If they have made the wrong bet with Scale AI & Wang then the company will suffer in the long term.