Key Points
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Mark Zuckerberg published a letter Monday arguing superintelligence should be distributed to everyone rather than controlled by a few institutions.
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Meta released an open-weight model the same day and said the weights of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2, will follow.
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Meta expects $130 billion to $145 billion of 2026 capital expenditures.
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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a letter on the company’s newsroom Monday titled “The Future is for Everyone.” It comes as close as anything the company has published to a mission statement for its enormous artificial intelligence (AI) budget. “The defining questions of our age,” he wrote, “are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it toward.”
His answer is to give the technology to everyone. The same day, Meta released Muse Glimmer, a family of open-weight models small enough to run on a laptop. Zuckerberg said the weights of Muse Spark 1.2, the company’s most advanced model, will follow — meaning the public can download the calculations that determine how the model behaves and use them freely.
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So the social media giant is giving away models it spends tens of billions of dollars developing. Is that a problem for shareholders — or the plan working as intended? I lean toward the second answer, and the letter is why.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
The giveaway is the strategy
The letter argues superintelligence should not be “centralized and restricted to a few institutions.” The most dangerous scenario, Zuckerberg writes, is “leading AI labs training powerful models and keeping them for themselves.” Distribution, in his telling, is both the safety plan and the business plan.
“Now that Meta Superintelligence Labs are up and running, we will resume releasing some open source models soon,” he wrote. The releases came the same day.
What the company keeps is everything around the model. The letter describes free versions “accessible to billions of people,” with heavier users paying for computing power through what Zuckerberg called a “dynamic auction mechanism” — a hint that the compute itself could become a business.
The letter carries a governance commitment too. Meta’s independent board of directors will approve the safety criteria for releasing models, a decision Zuckerberg writes shouldn’t rest with any single person, himself included.
Meta’s revenue, meanwhile, still comes almost entirely from advertising. After all, giving away model weights doesn’t hand competitors the ad system, the user base, or the data that make that business run.
The bill
The spending this philosophy requires is enormous, and it keeps climbing. Meta entered the year expecting $115 billion to $135 billion of 2026 capital expenditures, raised the range to $125 billion to $145 billion in April, and lifted the floor again in July to $130 billion to $145 billion. Second-quarter capital spending alone was $31.1 billion, up from $19.8 billion in the first quarter. And free cash flow shrank accordingly, from $12.4 billion in the first quarter to $784 million in the second.
Profits are feeling it too. Second-quarter net income fell 14% year over year to $15.8 billion as total costs rose 55%. The decline also reflected $2.4 billion of legal charges and severance costs tied to May’s job cuts.
Management still expects full-year operating income to come in above 2025’s. But the near-term cash story is one-directional. Meta paid $1.35 billion of dividends in the quarter and repurchased no stock, with the rest of the cash flow going into the build-out.
Can the ads keep covering it?
So far, yes. Second-quarter revenue rose 28% year over year to $60.8 billion, driven by 14% year-over-year growth in ad impressions and a 12% increase in the average price per ad.
Of course, the pace is moderating. The second quarter’s growth decelerated from the first quarter’s 33%, and management’s third-quarter guidance of $61 billion to $64 billion suggests more moderation ahead. Still, growth like this at Meta’s size is extraordinary.
The stock, though, is not priced as if the manifesto succeeds. At about $597 as of this writing, shares are down about 10% in 2026 and about 25% from their 52-week high. They cost about 18.5 times the earnings analysts expect over the coming year, and about 22 times earnings, against nearly 34 times for fellow AI heavyweight Nvidia.
The market’s worry is the arithmetic above (costs growing 55% against revenue growing 28%) and the years of spending the letter implies are still ahead.
Ultimately, I think the letter settles the cheaper half of the debate. Giving the weights away costs Meta little it was ever going to sell, and it fits how the company has always made money — free products, billions of users, advertising on top. The expensive half is the $130 billion of data centers, and the letter promises more of it. The ad business grew 28% last quarter. The market is paying about 18.5 times next year’s earnings for it.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
