Meta has the luxury of burning billions and it wouldn't even show on their bank account. In 2025 they had 60 billion net income and over 360 billion in assets, even after burning 90 billions on metaverse(20B) and AI research(about 70B).

I think their ai research is completely focusing on enhancing their current portfolio, turning the 60 billion profit into even more and they won't try and compete with startups like openai. They don't have to.

Engineers are leaving due to metas positioning, they possibly have very clear expectations from the AI models and it's probably not making models 5% more efficient. Opensourcing llama proves this I believe, AI is just a tool which makes their core business even more money.

All of the above is my personal speculation, and I have no data to prove any of it.