> I've been dabbling in AI recently, and I keep seeing FB's name appear all over the place. They were associated with some work that wrote human readable instructions on how to cook something- given only a list of ingredients. I have no idea why they are interested in cooking, but there logo was watermarked on every page of the deck. I've also read how they are building a really big and fast computer cluster to do ML. I don't know what they are doing on it, but they probably doing some R and some D. So, yeah, I have FB on my list of innovators.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of innovation going on at Facebook. That's guaranteed to happen when you have as much talent as they do.
Why isn't it translating over to their core business? Why do they have to continue to acquire companies (e.g., Oculus) to have potential areas for growth?
It doesn't make any sense. They would have more significantly success if they simply took half of their engineers, organized them into teams of 3-4 people, and gave each team $1-2M in startup capital VC style. Let's say they can create 2.5K teams. This would cost them $2.5B - $5B, or about than one tenth of what they spent last year in stock repurchases.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of innovation going on at Facebook. That's guaranteed to happen when you have as much talent as they do.
Why isn't it translating over to their core business? Why do they have to continue to acquire companies (e.g., Oculus) to have potential areas for growth?
It doesn't make any sense. They would have more significantly success if they simply took half of their engineers, organized them into teams of 3-4 people, and gave each team $1-2M in startup capital VC style. Let's say they can create 2.5K teams. This would cost them $2.5B - $5B, or about than one tenth of what they spent last year in stock repurchases.