I’m honestly unable to name a single innovation from a FAANG that wasn’t just buying another company or cloning a competitor in the last five years.

What has Meta or Google or Microsoft actually innovated on recently?

They havent innovated on anything of significance in decades. They just sit on their cash crops and buy up startups.

The M1 is kinda innovative but Apple did “just buy companies”.

Self-driving cars, from the Google self-driving car project, which was later renamed Waymo, kinda seems like a big deal to me.

Will be interesting to see if they keep it going or shut it gown.

Google has a way of starting something and then shutting it down.

These companies are always innovating. Google doesn't just say "Our ad recommendation system is good enough, lets just go into maintenence mode for a year." No. They constantly are trying to improve their models, switch to a better architecture, and innovate to try and eke out a few more percentage points of conversions.