10% chance to be market leader doesn’t sound as good as 60% second place to them for example
It's his call for sure, but rather funny as an argument.
It is because even if it would pan out, it would mean temporarily losing AI leadership, reducing stock price, losing the ability to hire talent, and by virtue of that losing the opportunity permanently.
He was against LLMs, reinforcement learning, etc. Claiming that those are a dead-end. He was wrong. His own "JEPA" ideas have basically gone nowhere. Meta was right in moving on without him.
Zuckerberg wanted to placate his shareholders with a shiny new thing now.
would've stopped Meta from delivering a polished product like Muse sooner.
Muse is not polished, unless usability and programming standards have fallen so far in the LLM vibe coding era that a pre-alpha state is now considered polished.
Muse is imperfect, as is all software, but calling it pre-alpha is a bit much.