WTF?! Few companies seem less likely to run out of AI capacity than Google and Meta, but even the industry's biggest names can hit a token wall. The search giant has reportedly limited the Facebook owner's use of Gemini after demand for AI capacity grew beyond what it could supply.
According to the Financial Times, Google warned Meta around March that it could not provide all the capacity the company wanted, disrupting and delaying internal AI projects.
The restrictions are still said to be in place. Meta has reportedly told employees to be more careful with AI tokens, the units used to measure model input, output, and usage. That's quite the change of tone for a company that has spent the past year pushing – and in some cases forcing – staff to use AI as much as possible.
Meta has spent billions building its own Llama family of open models, while Mark Zuckerberg has been pitching AI as the company's next defining platform, one Meta will hope does not go the same way as its metaverse bet.
But people familiar with the arrangement told the FT that Meta had been using Google's Gemini models for customer service, advertiser chatbots, coding, harmful content takedowns, and scam detection. Gemini was reportedly chosen because it performed better than Meta's own models. Anthropic's Claude is also said to be in the mix.
