Meta wants AI to fix America's friendship shortage
“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.”
Meta's AI bet echoes its failed $70B metaverse gamble
“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.”
Zuckerberg is building a personal CEO agent for himself
“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?”
“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.”
AI data collection is hitting the gig economy - DoorDash has launched a dedicated task app to leverage its massive driver network for hyper-local AI data labeling and collection.
“AI bots will generate more internet traffic than humans by 2027.”
Meta is bracing for rogue agent behavior - New enforcement systems are being deployed to mitigate AI agents that deviate from their programming or bypass content moderation filters on Meta's platforms.
“AI bots will generate more internet traffic than humans by 2027.”
Employee morale on Blind has collapsed under AI mandate
“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 is flattening management with 50 reports per manager
“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.”
“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.”
The internet may eventually be built for AI agents, not humans
“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.”
Employees fear they are automating away their own jobs
“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?”
Employees are being graded on how much AI they use
“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.”
“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 is monitoring employee keystrokes to train its AI models
“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.”
Meta's metaverse pivot cost $70 billion with little to show
“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.”
Zuckerberg believes AI can fill Americans' friendship gap
“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.”
Meta paid AI researchers up to $100 million in year one
“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.”
The internet may soon be built for agents, not humans
“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.”
