When Facebook, Inc. famously changed its name to Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021, it cemented that the behemoth social media company was now an emerging “metaverse company.” There was just one problem: the vast majority of people didn’t care about the metaverse. Meta struggled to demonstrate tangible value with the metaverse — hemorrhaging money and, in a way, facing a bit of an existential crisis following the company’s pivot.

For quarter after quarter, we heard less and less about the metaverse and more and more about AI. In fact, “how AI is transforming everything we do” is the major theme for Meta in 2025 — and rightfully so. Not only has Meta made demonstrable strides with AI, but it’s helping to future proof itself as a growth company, should its family of apps get affected by the current anti-trust case or changing social media sentiment. According to Forrester’s 2025 Media And Marketing Survey, 52% of US online adults indicate they feel more negatively about social media now vs. a year ago.

Meta Plans To Win The AI Race With Superintelligence

Leading up to Meta’s Q2 earnings call (later today), Mark Zuckerberg shed more light on the company’s superintelligence ambitions — a capstone that’s symbolic of Meta’s ongoing reinvention from a social media company to a metaverse company to, now, a super-intelligence company. Zuckerberg said:

  • “Superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment.”
  • “Meta’s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone.”
  • “Expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting.”

To do this requires the best of the best talent. And Meta’s been on a tear when it comes to recruiting top AI talent. If Meta leapfrogs the superintelligence race, it’s because of its deep pockets. Yes, money talks, and Meta is spending lots of it to lure luminaries from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Apple with lavish compensation packages while also spending hundreds of billions on data centers to power and scale its AI initiatives.

Zuckerberg’s Vision For Superintelligence Is Optimistic, Not Realistic

Meta’s CEO is hopeful that superintelligence will be used to empower people and not “focused on replacing large swaths of society.” But let’s be real: human replacement is already happening, and this is just the beginning. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, “CEOs are shrinking their workforces — and they couldn’t be prouder.”

Forrester data continues to corroborate this — in that business leaders see AI as an efficiency play above all else. According to Forrester’s State Of AI Survey, 2025, 43% of AI decision makers use “improved productivity” to measure their organizations’ AI outcomes. And the top two responses for how their organizations have been positively impacted by AI in the past year are: employee effectiveness and employee time savings. The fact is that AI can save companies’ time and money. That’s a good thing for shareholder value. But will it be good for society?

As with every major technology disruption some good will come from it … but also some bad. How bad the impact of superintelligence gets depends, in part, on the ethics of the companies developing it. Meta says it “will need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.”

But many companies are vying feverously to win the superintelligence race. But at what cost are they willing to do so? Mere trust in companies to do the right thing just isn’t going to cut it.

Forrester clients: Let’s chat more about this via a Forrester guidance session.