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Notes -
I would reject the idea that he's not done much. Not for consumers, no (his best product was Facebook circa 2004), but he's built an empire of information. WhatsApp has been a qualified success, and Facebook's cloning of Snapchat features has basically killed the latter company's trajectory. The Metaverse is an abject failure, but, you win some and you lose some.
And DeepSeek was undoubtedly a panic inducing setback, but the LLaMA play wasn't to establish dominance, but to prevent competitors from displacing Facebook through access to proprietary models. If someone else does that instead... well, he still has his spigots of cash and information.
In terms of his legacy, it's still too soon to tell. He's well-positioned to continue to make an impact: he has GPUs, and nothing matters more than them at this moment in history. If DeepSeek managed to build a better model than one costing an order of magnitude more, then it's not unreasonable to think Meta can now just copy that architecture and throw an order or two of magnitude more compute at it and make something even better.
The big question is whether Meta is able to excise the Google-style cruft and bureaucracy to be able to execute more quickly and effectively.
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