Meta Slumps on AI Spending, Echoing 2022 Metaverse Rout (www.bloomberg.com)

Meta’s stock took a hit after the company signaled it will dial back AI spending, reviving investor memories of the 2022 rout when heavy metaverse bets in Reality Labs pummeled the stock. The announcement — a pullback from aggressive, capital‑intensive buildouts — triggered concerns that Meta is pausing a major investment wave into model training capacity and data‑center hardware. Investors interpreted the move as evidence that the market won’t tolerate extended, high‑burn phases before clear revenue from AI investments materializes. For the AI/ML community, the shift matters because it could alter the pace and shape of infrastructure and research funding: slower procurement of GPUs and accelerators, fewer large‑scale pretraining runs, and tighter prioritization of productized AI features over exploratory research. That may favor efficiency engineering (model distillation, quantization, retrieval‑augmented methods) and partnerships with cloud or chip vendors over in‑house scale. It also echoes a broader investor expectation that AI initiatives must show nearer‑term monetization, not just long‑term platform potential — a dynamic that will influence hiring, open‑model commitments, and the competitive landscape among hyperscalers, chip suppliers, and AI startups.