Arm came from Acorn and Acorn did make the first ARM CPUs for their computers, so it's not really the first time they do this.

This is going to be a strategic challenge for ARM unless they are going to focus on chips that nobody else wants to make. And given the AI focus, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I would think that the RISC-V folks would be salivating at the prospect of flipping some existing ARM licensees to RISC-V.

The Acorn Archimedes came with Acorn branded CPUs (the "ARM250" IIRC) already in the late 80s. I can't recall what company made the chips for ARM at that time, but in the later Archimedes models it was VLSI.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506251

After Amazon, Google, and Apple all have had successes with in house ARM, I had naively assumed Meta would do the same. Given the speeds with which they have been developed, it must not be "that hard" to spin up a chip. You could have easily framed it as a long-term plan - custom chips for the Occlus.

Meta only recently announced a “long term” partnership with Nvidia:

https://about.fb.com/news/2026/02/meta-nvidia-announce-long-...

So how does this fit in? Is it a replacement for Nvidia’s portfolio of chips? Or just an alternative option to avoid dependency on one vendor? Something else?

How does this fit with Meta's decision to acquire Rivos?

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

This may not seem like an appropriate forum to say this, but this is a relevant and serious issue to neglect. With the current political climate and this relentless push for hundreds of these massive datacenters, everyone seems to have completely forgotten about the carbon emissions and climate change. These datacenters are such massive resource hogs that living near them is unviable due to their economic impact and overconsumption. Their impact on global climate, economy and even technology (talking about the RAM crunch) is much worse. But nobody seems to be keeping tabs anymore.

One thing to remember is that the climate catastrophe is not a single cataclysmic event like falling off a cliff. It's more like a lanslide that starts small and then gradually accretes into a massive disaster that's barreling towards you. And we're in it already. We're already paying a price in terms of human lives and the planet's biomass as a whole due to natural disasters that are becoming more frequent. We don't notice it because the increase is gradual.

And all that for what? Writing reports, reading emails, generating endless slop and waging wars? I'm not against AI or any other technology. But this cost doesn't seem justified considering their contributions to serious endeavors like medical research and habitat loss. This is ironic because we were talking two decades ago about ditching interpreted languages in favor of compiled languages for servers/services, in order to improve their carbon footprint. It looks like a joke today considering what these AI datacenters and crypto farms do. But we really can't really afford to forget it now. Remember that when you pay for AI with your money, someone else pays for it with their blood.

"in-house" is misleading

> Like nearly all fabless AI chipmakers, Arm currently manufactures its CPU at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ’s fabrication plants.

The key early signals from OpenAI FB missed were when OpenAI Five was featured DOTA 2's The International in 2018 and in April 2019 when it beat the pro team OG.

I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar.

But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under fire of a whistleblower / document leak cycle.

Despite all the money spent on VR labs, I always thought the pivot was much more of a Philip-Morris -> Altria thing than Dunkin' Donuts -> Dunkin'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five#Reception

Meta will always need the next platform. Instagram, Facebook phone, Whatsapp, Reels, Marketplace, Portal, VR, AI... Some succed, some fail. When you are an Ads company, the surface where ads are delivered to is important. I don't think it's a fundamentally different business model from Google's. VR addresses an interesting and increasing niche of people that refuse human contact and prefer the online world - for those people clothes, going out, buying a car, spending money on whatever the current society spends money on might not be so interesting, instead a parallel, virtual world, might be.

As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.

Facebook's strength has never been innovation, but adapting to the changes; mostly through acquisition.

With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage.

Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)

Is being a serious competitor to OpenAI a good business proposition? OpenAI burns through insane amounts of cash and it seems pretty likely that it will ultimately just be replaced by cheaper Chinese models/inference.

The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are licensing theirs for fine-tuning like we see with Cursor.

Meta was on a roll with their early research and work with Llama and other models. Then it all just seemed to trail off. I’m sure they’re doing some interesting things internally but it does feel like they were in the right place to have capitalized on it a lot more.

meta had the gpus to train llama because of their capital spend on horizons, so at least they were in the game, but maybe he didn't see "chatbot" as a trillion dollar product category