Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. picture alliance/Getty; Tyler Le/BI

Mark Zuckerberg keeps coming out on top

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. picture alliance/Getty; Tyler Le/BI

Meta's AI gamble is suddenly looking like a win for Mark Zuckerberg.

That was far from a given. Even the Meta CEO was doubting himself. His company had poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI investments with largely unproven results.

"Are you sure this is going to work?" he asked his 29-year-old AI chief, Alexandr Wang, at the end of last year, he recalled on a recent episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast.

Those risky AI bets — which one analyst compared to throwing spaghetti at the wall — as well as the massive layoffs and reorganization that came with them, are now starting to pay off. Meta beat its AI rivals to the punch with its new AI assistant, Muse, and it finally released a frontier AI model.…