Meta’s AI Optimism Ad Echoes Its Costly Metaverse Playbook

Meta launched a splashy new ad this week promising that artificial intelligence will make the world better, and it barely shows any actual AI to prove it. The 45 second spot, titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” is the opening shot in what the company calls a broader campaign against “AI doomers.” It lands six days before Meta reports earnings that Wall Street will comb for proof its AI spending is working.

Mark Zuckerberg has sold this exact kind of optimism before. He once called the metaverse the successor to the mobile internet, then watched the division built to chase it lose more than $80 billion in six years. Now he is asking investors, employees and the public to trust the sequel, and the price tag this time is bigger.

A Minute of Optimism, Barely Any AI

The video opens with screenshots of grim AI headlines before cutting to daylight footage of commuters walking and kids playing. A couple dances. A crowd smiles. Someone scrolls Facebook on a phone. None of it looks like a product demo.

• Screenshots of dystopian AI headlines dissolve into ordinary daylight scenes of people walking and playing
• A couple dances and a crowd smiles, with no on-screen explanation of what any of it has to do with AI
• The words “Muse Spark,” part of the model family that remixes Instagram photos, flash across a laptop screen for roughly a second
• The Meta AI interface appears briefly with no caption explaining what it actually does
• The final 15 seconds cut to Meta’s smart glasses, including its Ray-Ban replacement fronted by Kylie Jenner

The narration does the heavy lifting instead. “Some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected, that it’s gonna leave us behind,” it says. “We couldn’t disagree more.” It closes with a line built for a highlight reel: “Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds.”

The Pitch Lands Six Days Before Earnings

Zuckerberg posted the video Thursday on his own Facebook account. “Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,” he wrote in the caption. “As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone.”

The messaging arrives ahead of Meta’s second quarter earnings call on July 29, where the company faces pressure to show that its planned AI investment, guided as high as $145 billion for the year, is delivering returns. Denise Moreno, Meta’s chief marketing officer, echoed the theme on LinkedIn. “The discourse around AI spans everything from existential dread to utopian visions,” she wrote. “We’re taking a different stance: we think AI will empower people to do more of what they love.”

Moreno limited comments on that post.

Zuckerberg Ran This Exact Play on the Metaverse

In late 2021, Zuckerberg renamed his company from Facebook to Meta and predicted the metaverse was “going to be the successor of the mobile internet.” The division built to make that real, Reality Labs, has since accumulated over $80 billion in total operating losses since late 2020, according to Meta’s first quarter 2026 earnings report.

The pattern eventually broke in the other direction. Zuckerberg told executives to cut Reality Labs spending by roughly 30 percent and reallocate the money elsewhere, and in October 2025 Meta moved Vishal Shah, who had led its metaverse initiatives, into a vice president role inside the company’s AI-focused Superintelligence Labs division. The hardware survived. The framing did not.

Metaverse Money Versus AI Money

Set side by side, the two bets share a shape: a confident public pitch, a rising bill, and a workforce absorbing the cost.

The last row is the one worth watching. Reality Labs got its budget trimmed once the losses became impossible to ignore. The AI budget has only grown.

Six Moves in Six Months

The ad did not appear in isolation. It caps a year of restructuring that Meta has tied directly to its AI ambitions.

1. January 2026: Meta cuts 10 to 15 percent of its Reality Labs workforce and shuts down several VR game studios.
2. March 2026: About 700 more positions are eliminated across at least five divisions.
3. April 29, 2026: Meta raises its 2026 capex guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion; shares fall as much as 6 percent after hours and slide further, down as much as 10 percent, when markets open the next day.
4. May 20, 2026: Roughly 8,000 employees, about 10 percent of the workforce, are notified of layoffs, while 7,000 more are reassigned into new AI focused teams under Superintelligence Labs.
5. June 12, 2026: In an internal memo reviewed by Reuters, Zuckerberg admits the company has made missteps during the overhaul.
6. July 23, 2026: Meta releases “The Future Is for Everyone.”

Who Got Left Out of “Everyone”

The word “everyone” is doing a lot of work in that title. The same company running this campaign has, in recent months, used the productivity benefits of AI as justification for laying off thousands of its own staff. It has also faced accusations of using AI to help justify cuts that disproportionately affected workers on medical leave.

Meta is separately being sued by publishers over claims it trained its AI systems on copyrighted material without permission. And the company once had an internal policy document that reportedly permitted AI chatbots to engage in “sensual” conversations with minors, a detail that sits uneasily next to a campaign built around trust.

In the June memo, Zuckerberg did not dodge the toll internally. “Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” he wrote, according to Reuters’ review of the document. Roughly 15,000 employees saw their jobs or responsibilities change in that single restructuring window.

Is the Spending Matching the Message?

Ask Zuckerberg directly about payoff, and the optimism gets thinner. Pressed by an analyst in April for signs of return on the AI buildout, he offered this.

That’s a very technical question.

He said it on Meta’s first quarter earnings call, according to Fortune, the same call where the company raised its capex guidance and watched its stock drop. Total expenses that quarter jumped 35 percent to $33.4 billion, driven mostly by infrastructure costs and pay, chief financial officer Susan Li told analysts.

Meta reports second quarter results on July 29. That call, not the ad, is where investors will find out whether the optimism has numbers behind it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Muse Spark, the AI model shown in Meta’s ad?

Muse Spark is one of two AI models Meta launched between July 7 and July 9, alongside Muse Image. The pair are built to generate revenue through cloud services, APIs and subscriptions, with Meta pricing its API access roughly 25 percent below rivals.

What is Meta’s Superintelligence Labs?

Superintelligence Labs is the AI unit led by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. Roughly 7,000 employees moved into the division during Meta’s May 2026 restructuring, organized into AI focused teams including Applied AI Engineering and the Agent Transformation Accelerator.

Why does Meta call AI critics “doomers”?

Meta uses the term to describe people warning of job losses, existential risk or a dystopian future tied to artificial intelligence. The new ad campaign was built specifically to offer what the company calls an alternative to that framing, without naming which competitors or individuals it has in mind.

How does the 2026 restructuring compare to Meta’s last big layoff round?

Meta’s 2022 to 2023 “Year of Efficiency” eliminated roughly 21,000 positions. The 2026 round is smaller in direct headcount, at about 8,000 layoffs, but reaches further once the 7,000 reassigned employees are counted alongside it.