MENLO PARK, June 26 — Meta helped shape the modern internet. Its platforms connect billions of people every day. For years, the company invested heavily in artificial intelligence before generative AI became the technology industry’s biggest battleground.
Yet one of Facebook’s most influential former executives believes the company failed to turn those advantages into leadership. Speaking on The Axios Show, former Facebook executive and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and the company “completely fumbled” what he viewed as a defining opportunity in AI.
He argued that the company failed to move decisively during the early days of the generative AI boom, allowing Nvidia and chief executive Jensen Huang to establish themselves at the centre of the AI ecosystem. Palihapitiya was an early Facebook executive who played a major role in expanding the platform’s global user base. His latest comments offer one of the strongest public criticisms of Meta’s AI strategy from someone who helped build the company.
Asked by Axios how Meta lost the advantage he believed it once had, Palihapitiya said he could not explain the company’s internal decisions. “I don’t know the organisation well enough, nor do I understand the political dynamics to understand why they failed as miserably as they have.
But they’ve profoundly failed,” he said. He stressed that he was not speculating about why Meta made those decisions because he no longer has insight into the company’s internal leadership.
A Familiar Pattern
Palihapitiya compared today’s AI race with an earlier chapter in Facebook’s history. He recalled trying to persuade the company to build its own smartphone platform while he worked there. At the time, he believed Facebook could have carved out a different path for itself in mobile computing.
That didn’t happen either. Nvidia, meanwhile, has become the indispensable player in AI hardware.
Jensen Huang’s company now sits at the centre of the AI ecosystem, supplying the chips that power the most advanced models from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Meta, for all its early investment in AI research and its open-source language models, has not claimed that kind of central position. Palihapitiya’s critique lands at a moment when Meta is still pouring billions into AI infrastructure and research.
The company recently released its latest large language model and continues to integrate AI features across its apps. But the former executive’s words carry weight because they come from someone who was in the room during Facebook’s earlier growth phases — and who now watches from the outside as a new race unfolds.
