Mark Zuckerberg Is Spending Hundreds of Billions on AI. His New Strategy in the Race Against OpenAI Is Surprisingly Simple.

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The AI race has produced massive data centers, expensive chips and billion-dollar talent wars. Mark Zuckerberg’s latest weapon is much simpler: keep the prices down.

Meta unveiled Muse Spark 1.1, a new AI model with a paid tier for developers, creating a new revenue stream as the company races against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Zuckerberg says the new Meta Model API will cost roughly 25% of what competing AI models charge.

“The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg.

It’s a big change for Meta, which has spent years releasing its AI models for free. The company has made cuts to invest heavily in AI infrastructure as Zuckerberg pushes toward his goal of creating superintelligence.

Zuckerberg says building its own models is critical to creating AI products that can reach billions of users, rather than relying on competitors to power Meta’s future.