The company that lives off your attention.
Three apps, one portfolio. Facebook is the social network for friends and groups. Instagram - for photos and video. WhatsApp - for messages. To you they're separate worlds with separate logos. To Meta they're three channels running the same business: it shows you an ad between the things you're watching and earns money for every second you haven't closed the app.
Llama is a family of AI models that Meta builds and gives away freely to every programmer in the world - a competitive move against companies that lock their models behind paid access. The idea is simple and sly: get thousands of companies to build their products on top of Llama, and they become dependent on Meta's infrastructure, even without paying for it directly.
This year Llama got a successor - Muse. First came Muse Spark, the text model that replaces the older Llama versions. Then, very recently, Muse Image - a model that generates photos and ad visuals directly inside Instagram and Meta's advertising tools. A business can produce dozens of variants of one ad with a few clicks, without paying a designer for each one.
And here's where the circle closes. AI models aren't a separate product for sale - they're the machine that makes the ad business cheaper and stickier. The better Muse understands what makes you stop scrolling, the more precisely the ad finds you. Free models for developers and paid ads for businesses are two sides of the same coin.
This makes me ask
People spend weeks making ad visuals - I've watched hundreds of them do it. Muse Image produces them in seconds, inside the same app you scroll through at night. That's not bad news by itself - it democratizes access for the small business that has no budget for an agency. But behind it stands the same old math: the smoother and cheaper the ad flows, the less reason Meta has to let you leave the app. It hands you AI with one hand, holds your attention with the other.