Meta has started selling its AI models to outside developers for the first time. Zuckerberg's sales pitch is blunt: strong performance, very cheap. The capability he's pushing hardest is agents, meaning AI that finishes a task by actually operating a computer when you ask it to. Reading Meta's own scorecard in plain terms: in the 'getting AI to do work' events, Meta claims first place, well ahead of Anthropic. But the same scorecard honestly lists the weaknesses too: Anthropic still leads in coding skill, and OpenAI leads in long projects and visual reasoning. So Meta's strategy isn't 'the best', it's 'good enough, at the lowest price.' The calculation: with datacenters already paid for by Facebook and Instagram money, Meta can win by squeezing on price.
Why it matters · Meta selling inference 'at a very low price' is a price-war declaration, and model price wars are won by whoever owns the cheapest compute. Bullish for the buildout, brutal for margins.