Facebook parent company Meta—which lost over $83 billion since 2021 trying to convince people the metaverse was the next internet frontier—has finally burned enough cash to catch up with the AI frontier, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday.

Zuckerberg told the FT on Monday that Meta’s new Muse Wonder AI model would “allow much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what is being done in the AI field.” He added, “Getting to this point both required a large amount of compute and investment, and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time.”

The Muse app has indeed taken off. According to Barron’s, after debuting in early September, Muse hit the No. 1 spot on Human Security’s list of top agent-based traffic sources on the internet, accounting for 72% of the total. Analysts at Citigroup are bullish on Muse, recently projecting $27 billion in annual revenue by 2030 largely based on transaction and subscription revenue before advertising. Muse’s agentic abilities have sparked concern in other sectors (like travel agencies, tax preparers, and car valuation websites, Reuters reported) that Meta could be about to eat their lunch.

Yet there are also the jaw-dropping expenditures on compute that make Muse possible in the first place and the chance that this product could be joining the market just as the AI bubble begins to strain . The tens of billions spent on the metaverse push, for example, pale in comparison to data center buildout costs.

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