Yahoo Finance

Gen AI has real sustainability issues: Early Facebook investor

Meta Platforms (META) is all in on generative AI with some on Wall Street believing its executions in artificial intelligence deployments are out-performing peers in the tech space. While reporting a first-quarter earnings beat on the top and bottom line yesterday, Meta's stock has been dragged lower into Thursday's session on the tech giant's disappointing second-quarter outlook. On Meta's earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg believed there's "a clear monetizable opportunity" for up-scalings on AI even though investors fear it will detract from Meta's core business component: its digital advertising. Elevation Partners Co-Founder Roger McNamee — who was an early Meta investor when it originally operated as Facebook — sits down with Yahoo Finance to weigh in on Meta's new AI direction and shares his criticisms on Big Tech's early generative AI adoption before working out the kinks. "If you believe that generative AI is real, then these investments may well work. The challenge that we have here is that this is a classic example of a product category where the demos are mind-bending, but the reality is something far less than that," McNamee explains. "And I think that we have seen consistently in use case after use case that the actual performance in the field has real issues, and the industry itself is trying to pretend like it's not a problem, that the amount of electrical power it requires is greater than the largest states in the country, that it needs more water than a small country. That the architecture itself appears to be deeply flawed..." For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode. This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.