The conventional wisdom in tech is that it's better to overspend than miss out on a blockbuster hit.

Big Tech's investors hate when their companies overdo it. They showed that through their recent sell-off of Alphabet Inc. when it said it would lavish more cash than expected on artificial intelligence, and again with their drubbing of Meta Platforms Inc. shares when it stated much the same.

It didn't help Mark Zuckerberg's company that it reported its second-quarter earnings on the same day as Microsoft Corp., whose AI spending tends to deliver immediate returns via its Azure cloud business. Meta can't translate its spending into revenue so easily. AI has improved its ad targeting, but there are limits to how much more it can squeeze from that. Even so, the Facebook founder and amateur mixed martial arts fighter has articulated his AI game plan more clearly than before, and it sounds more plausible than anything he ever said about his virtual-reality misadventure, the Metaverse.

Meta's plans encompass three key areas: personal AI agents, business agents and renting out data centers to other companies. All three are in their nascent stages or non-existent in terms of sales, but Zuckerberg has solid........

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