AVOID META

“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.”

“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.”

“Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training data. This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“Meta also believes it can rethink the company's org chart. In March, Megan reported on an internal memo that laid out how Meta was creating a new team focused on AI development. They would have a very flat organizational structure. It would be 50 employees reporting to one manager, for instance. So, like, really getting rid of the middle layers of management.”

“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?”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told them, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise, which you and I would never do if we were running a convenience store.”

“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.”

“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 and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or so.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We should also talk about the fact that under Tim Cook's tenure, Apple has become what I would consider an AI laggard. Right? They are not a frontier AI model company. Their own AI efforts under the banner of Apple Intelligence have been sort of delayed over and over again. They have not managed to give Siri the sort of brain transplant that they have been teasing now for years. And I think it is fair to say that they are behind when it comes to AI and all AI related things.”

“If Meta gets their way, they're gonna revolutionize the Internet again. Think what they did the first time around with Facebook, what they tried to do the second time around with the metaverse, it didn't work. This is sort of like their attempt to do the metaverse thing again, but in a way that they think is gonna be more successful now. Yeah. 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.”

“AI's approval rating is 26%, which is lower than ICE's or just about any other unpopular institution you can think of. People hate this stuff. And the the tech CEOs have realized that they are very, very hated. And so now you're you're seeing some of them be like, yo. Wait a minute. No. No. Like, we're we'll do something good for lots of people that that aren't just us.”

“That was yeah. That happened three years into his tenure, and, that rascal Bono convinced him to put songs of innocence into the hands of something like 500,000,000 people. What's your favorite song off songs of innocence, by the way? I have like, that album has started auto playing in my car so many times over the years.”

“Chinese robot beats human best time in half marathon after a stumble. A five foot five humanoid called Lightning Short King, developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, has beat the human world record time for a half marathon. But just before completing the race, there was some drama. Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The robot managed to get back on its feet and ran across the finish line in fifty minutes and twenty six seconds.”

“I think the thing that has made me the most sad, Kevin, has been the darkening of the culture in Silicon Valley where a lot of folks who, I think could have been talked into UBI type proposals, or, hey, let's try and keep the machinery going. They have given up. They're just like, fuck it. I've got my bunker. You know, like, I'm just projecting forward. Like, I have seen that degree of fatalism from many, many more folks in the valley than I would have imagined.”

“I remember when the Apple Watch came out, there was this moment of, like, oh, Apple's cooked. Like, they can no longer innovate. This thing is obviously not going to work. This is just a gadget for luxury users, and this is not going to sort of be useful enough for many people to shell out for. And then I think Tim Cook, to his credit, saw that health was taking off. The people wanted to track their steps. They wanted to know if their blood oxygen levels were changing or if their heartbeat was irregular.”

“We should try and find ways to get off of taxing human labor. We're going to be trying to encourage job type arrangements in every quarter. And right now, income tax is a discouraging factor on both the employer and the worker. So tax AI, tax the bots, don't tax humans. And the way I would do a universal basic income, if any of them come to me and, you know, is, I would do some amount like $1,200 a month, for every American and just start paying it out as as quickly as you can.”

“Tim Cook, presented Trump with a golden glass statue in August 2025 while he was seeking tariff relief in what just appeared to be an obvious bribe right out in the open. By the way, he did get that tariff relief, so it worked. Tim Cook also attended the VIP screening of Melania, which, again, when I said this man would do anything for his company, I think that is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.”

“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.”

“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?”

“So the Titan project was Apple's $10,000,000,000 effort to build a self driving car, which I think was instinctively something that, honestly, a lot of people really wanted. Right? Like, when I heard that Apple was building a car, like, I definitely wanted to see it. I definitely wanted to test drive it. I definitely wanted to see if songs of innocence would autoplay when I turned the key in the ignition, but they canceled the project in 2024.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Meta has 3,500,000,000 daily users around the world. That would be a lot of people that could use the chatbot. It's a lot of people that could use the chatbot. Exactly. And so, you know, investors and analysts argue that Meta has the distribution. That's not the problem. Right? Like, if you're Claude or you're ChatGPT, the companies behind those chatbots, you're trying to grow. You're trying to get people to use these things, but, like, you're starting from scratch.”