Meta's AI ambitions falter while crypto's newest frenzy removes all barriers

May 16th, 2025

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Read Time: 10 Minutes

Today’s Menu

  • Meta's 'Behemoth' delay exposes the brutal reality of AI development

  • Internet Capital Market tokens demolish fundraising barriers at unprecedented risk

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TODAY IN AI

Meta's 'Behemoth' delay exposes the brutal reality of AI development

Meta's AI division is struggling with a significant setback as the Wall Street Journal reports the company has postponed the release of 'Behemoth,' its flagship AI model. Engineers are failing to deliver meaningful improvements over previous versions, forcing the launch to be pushed back to later this year amid mounting concerns about the model's performance.

The delay has created substantial internal friction, with senior executives reportedly "frustrated" with the team's progress and considering major changes to the division. This roadblock comes at a precarious time for Meta, which has invested billions in its AI ambitions while competitors continue to advance their capabilities.

What's particularly telling about this setback is how it contradicts the narrative of inevitable, continuous progress in AI development. Behemoth was supposed to be Meta's answer to GPT-4 and Claude 3—a model that would establish the company as a true AI leader rather than just a fast follower. Instead, it's become a costly reminder that scaling AI isn't simply a matter of throwing more compute and data at the problem.

This struggle reveals a crucial truth about the current state of AI development: we may be approaching an innovation plateau where incremental improvements require exponentially more resources. The easy gains have been harvested, and now companies are fighting for increasingly marginal advances at tremendous cost.

For the broader tech ecosystem, Meta's challenges suggest that AI development may become more concentrated among a small group of companies with the resources to weather these expensive setbacks. The winner-take-most dynamic could accelerate, with only those capable of absorbing billion-dollar failures remaining competitive in the foundational model race.

Today In Crypto

Internet Capital Market tokens demolish fundraising barriers at unprecedented risk

A new crypto phenomenon called Internet Capital Market (ICM) tokens is gaining explosive traction, essentially functioning as "memecoins on meth" but with far greater implications for how ideas get funded and monetized online.

The concept is radically simple: Anyone with a business idea, app, project, or even just a meme can post about it on Twitter/X, tag @launchcoin with a token name and ticker, and immediately have a tradable token launched on Solana. Creators earn 50% of fee revenue without requiring token allocations, presales, or staking requirements.

This represents a profound shift in how ideas become tradable assets. Traditional fundraising requires months or years of pitching, securing investment, building teams, and developing products. The ICM approach compresses this timeline to hours or days: use AI to code a minimum viable product, make it public, launch a token, and fundraise in real-time.

Three massive barriers to entry have effectively disappeared:

  • Knowledge barriers eliminated through AI-assisted development

  • Time barriers removed by bypassing traditional investor courting

  • Cost barriers reduced from hiring development teams to $20/month AI subscriptions

However, these innovations come with glaring red flags. Creating assets expected to grow in value based on a creator's efforts without SEC registration treads dangerously close to securities fraud. Additionally, while traditional fundraising's high barriers filtered out weak ideas, ICM tokens remove these quality controls entirely, potentially flooding the market with underdeveloped concepts.

The strategic takeaway is clear but uncomfortable: we're witnessing the complete compression of the idea-to-market cycle, with both revolutionary potential and catastrophic risks. For investors, this environment demands unprecedented caution, as the line between innovation and fraud becomes increasingly blurred. For entrepreneurs, it creates powerful new options but removes the valuable stress-testing that traditional fundraising provides.

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