Mark Zuckerberg once sold us the metaverse. Now he wants us to believe he’s going to lead us into the age of superintelligence. Should we fall for it again?

Elon Musk once called him “Zuck the Fourteenth,” a jab comparing Meta’s CEO to France’s King Louis XIV—a monarch infamous for his ego, extravagance, and disregard for limits. It’s a fitting label, especially as Zuckerberg floods the headlines, positioning himself as Silicon Valley’s new AI king.

But let’s rewind.

Just a few years ago, Zuckerberg declared that the metaverse was the future of humanity. In a slickly produced video released on October 28, 2021, he rebranded Facebook as Meta Platforms and declared, “The metaverse is the next frontier.” It was a bold new vision: a 3D immersive virtual world where we would live, work, and socialize as digital avatars using Meta-manufactured VR headsets and smart glasses.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjNI9K1D_xo[/embed]

Meta poured nearly $20 billion into Reality Labs, the division tasked with building this digital utopia, in a single year. The promise? A seamless escape from the real world into a vibrant virtual one.

But the promised land never arrived. Despite the investment, the user adoption didn’t follow. Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse platform, struggled to retain interest. The headsets were clunky, the software buggy, and the use cases unclear. People didn’t want to live in VR. The metaverse flopped.

Now, Zuckerberg wants the public, and the tech world, to believe he’s leading the charge into the next big thing: artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This is the holy grail of AI. A moment when machines surpass human intelligence across nearly all tasks. It’s what some call superintelligence, and it’s no longer just science fiction.

But there’s a problem. Meta is not leading. OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and China’s DeepSeek have pulled ahead with more advanced models and tools. Meta’s LLaMA models are competent, but not groundbreaking. The company’s biggest claim to fame in the AI arms race so far? Making its large language models open source.

Now Zuckerberg is trying to change that by opening his wallet.

In what’s becoming an aggressive poaching campaign, Meta has started offering “giant offers” to top AI researchers. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, some of these offers exceed $100 million. Meta has already lured away key talent, including Alexandr Wang (founder of Scale AI), Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), and OpenAI veterans like Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren.

Zuckerberg isn’t hiding it. He recently announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, an ambitious effort to consolidate AI efforts under one roof and leapfrog the competition. In his internal memo, he promised that Meta will lead the way in delivering personal superintelligence, an AI that can manage your life, schedule your time, guide your decisions, and essentially act as a personal brain assistant.

And he’s made it clear: he’s not done hiring.

It’s a dramatic pivot and a savvy one. AI is no longer hype. It’s here, and it’s transforming everything from how we work to how we think. Whether you fear it or embrace it, AI is shaping the next phase of human life.

But that doesn’t mean Zuckerberg gets to be its face.

After all, this is the same executive who once told the world that a legless cartoon avatar in VR was our future. The same person who sank tens of billions into a virtual world that no one wanted. Now he’s asking us to trust him on AGI, a technology that could reshape the world, economies, and the future of human labor.

Zuckerberg isn’t an AI visionary. He’s a ruthless competitor who spots the next big thing and tries to buy his way to the top. He couldn’t beat TikTok, so he cloned Reels. He couldn’t acquire Snapchat, so he copied Stories. Now he’s applying the same playbook to AI: buy the best people, sell a big vision, and hope the world forgets what happened last time.

If anything, his pivot to AI is proof of just how serious this moment is. Because when Zuckerberg starts spending, it’s not out of curiosity. It’s because he smells dominance.

And that might be the most compelling reason to pay attention.

Not because he’s leading the way in building artificial superintelligence, but because he’s trying to control who gets to build it, and what rules they play by.