Inside Meta’s Big AI Pivot

“Meta finds itself sort of racing to catch up. Right? And so they were giving out $100,000,000 offers to researchers trying to basically, like, rebuild this team and become competitive. Multi year deals worth $300,000,000. These are for scientists and engineers. This is wild. It's like NBA superstar money. With some of them receiving a $100,000,000 straight up in year one, a $100,000,000.”

“And then last year, it comes out that employees are gonna start to be graded on how much they use AI. And Meta's leadership expects employees to use AI a lot. What we've seen, there's a lot of internal memos that have kind of come out over the last few weeks. And one of them, the CTO, Andrew Bosworth, says in the future, AI agents are actually primarily going to do the work and that the human's jobs will be to supervise them, direct them, and and and help them improve.”

“A memo went out on Tuesday from a researcher who works on building the models. And they said, hey, guys. Our models need to get better at learning how to use computers. And so therefore, we are now going to be monitoring your keystrokes, your mouse movements, and your click locations, feed that data to our AI models to help them understand, basically, how to use a computer. That sounds kind of dystopian. A lot of employees were not happy about this. The top ranked comment on this post was, this makes me super uncomfortable. How can I opt out? Spoiler, there is no way to opt out.”

“Mark Zuckerberg himself is working on building a CEO agent to help him do his job. I think the agent is helping him retrieve information faster. So before, he might have to go through multiple layers of people to find information. Now, he can just ask his agent to go find wherever it is and, you know, the emails or the drives or whatever and get the answer versus having to, you know, do that like, telephone game of, like, hey. Can you go ask this person this?”

“So what Mark Zuckerberg has said is he wants everyone to have their own personal super intelligence. We think people, as I reported last year, he thinks people have the capacity to have more friends than they do, and that AI can solve some of these problems. The average American, I think, has I think it's fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or something.”

“Well, the Internet is optimized for humans. The Internet is not optimized for other chatbots to use. And so at a certain point, this is what people talk about. At a certain point, the Internet might not be for us anymore. Right? The Internet might be a place where agents go to talk to other AI agents. Right now, the Internet is a place for humans, and so it's sort of built for us. And so there's a lot of cases where, the AI has to act like a human to get to what it needs because it's not built for the AI.”

“Megan looked at data from a website called Blind, where people who work at tech companies can post anonymously about their employers. In 2024, roughly 20% of the posts about Meta were negative. This year, more than 80% of the posts about Meta are negative. Because they're being asked to train their digital replacements, essentially. That is exactly how someone put it to me was, am I automating away my own job?”

“I mean, look at the metaverse. Right? It didn't happen. And it's $70,000,000,000 down the drain, but they're gonna spend more on AI now. Do you think they'll change their name again like they did when they were going all in on the metaverse? What would you name it? Like, what would you change it to? I thought of a name that they could they could use. Okay. Let's hear it. Skynet. That means nothing to me.”