Meta looks like AI winner, enough of Metaverse, Barron’s says

Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rename his company Meta Platforms META -1.23% will go down as one of the silliest ideas in American corporate history, Eric J. Savitz writes in this week’s edition of Barron’s. For investors, every utterance of the word “Meta” is an unpleasant reminder of Zuckerberg’s commitment to the metaverse, a mammoth long shot that’s years from ever paying off. You could see the market’s metaverse disdain playing out in real time this past week during Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, the author says. But the “good stuff” at the conference related to a flurry of new initiatives in generative artificial intelligence software. The announcements showed that the company is thinking creatively about AI as a way to make its platforms more engaging-and eventually more lucrative, the publication adds.