It's about growth.

Meta stock is priced as a growth stock - not on its current financial returns but on what the market believes it will do in the future. It has been priced like this from the start because it has been growing since the start.

As soon as it stops being able to convince the market it is still growing, then the stock price drops to what the business's current financials dictate, which will be a huge drop. That huge drop has severe negative consequences for everyone involved in that decision. Spending tens of billions on the Metaverse project was better, even though it failed, because it created a growth story they could sell to the market.

So now that's gone they need another growth story. Given the current state of the tech world, that's probably AI-related. And they probably need their own models as part of it.

They can't just "survive the shift" because it's not really about survival. They need to be part of the shift, so that they can convince the market that they're still growing.