Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Meta has subsequently ruined IG and seems busy working up new ways to ruin WhatsApp.
Not so much with Oculus though. The whole metaverse thing ended up being very cringe.
I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).
I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.
This is true but similar to saying Adolf Hitler was one of the greatest Commanders in Chief
Spot on.
If I'm a magic eight ball, I'm going to go with "Outlook not good" on how history's going to view him. Being a CEO that is "performing better" than all the others is but a single piece of the puzzle.
That seems impossible. What does that say about us?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the products being promoted are actually highly treasured by a large number of people.
Zuck is the poster boy for enshittification [0]. The dark pattern business model involves companies making money long after their users stop loving their offerings.
At first, sure. The more time passes, however, the less CEOs are judged solely on monetary returns.
Hell, IMO, to judge a CEO solely on monetary returns in the present is selective reasoning at best.
I'll agree Zuck is amazing at spotting large macro trends in technology and capitalizing on them (VR he was a little early at, but I still buy it could be big).
However, he wasn't able to do that with AI, the big companies and startups weren't selling. So the question is, can he build a team? I'm skeptical, he put Alexandr Wang, someone who never built a foundational model in charge of all their AI efforts? It could be a great move, but might also be a swing and a miss.
If GPT-6, 7 and 8 continue to see diminishing returns on performance as we say from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5, then I see it becoming a winner take all of OpenAI.
What I think is ignored is how at the time, all the investors were singing Meta's doom due to Apple retiring IDFA and META's stock was crashing. Then it comes out that Meta had spent that last year buying a ton of GPUs just before the GPU supply crunch and the stock completely rebounds. Zuckerburg seems incapable of being caught with his pants down.
All the recent talk of Zuckerberg reeks of recency bias. He could completely screw up AI and he'd still be head and shoulders above every other founder/CEO.
I really disagree with this take, if LLMs stop progressing you still have major FAANG corporations (like Meta!) paying gobs of money to Anthropic to increase dev productivity.
If LLMs only help the average office worker increase their productivity by 10%, that is still a huge multi-billion dollar market waiting to be captured.
You make good points about people doubting Zuck and Meta before and them being spectacularly wrong, I'm certainly not willing to bet the house against him right now. I think if he had been able to buy Thinking Machines I would have thought it was very similar to Instagram or WhatsApp.
But he wasn't able to, so now i'm not sure it's a done deal that Meta won't be wasting many billions.
That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at the right moment.
The Instagram purchase was in 2012. Who was still expecting mobile to come crashing down in the iPhone 5 era?
I think most of us in the valley were already starting see mobile explode, it seemed obvious, but I think there were 2 things that really obstructed Facebook's "pivot" into mobile.
1. Facebook went public in 2012 with a very strange voting structure
2. While mobile was growing, the sentiment was that mobile could not be monetized as an ad platform.
As I remember it - the investor sentiment (and I mean broader wallstreet, not necessarily VCs), was that facebook was burning money in mobile and zuckerberg was abusing his power chasing it. While you can argue Facebook was late - I think it's only obvious in hindsight that Zuckerberg, a first time, 28yo founder, did the right thing in ignoring the noise and betting on mobile.
Furthermore I think calling Instagram a hail mary is reductive. When it comes to advertising, only Google and Facebook really cracked the code on making mobile ads profitable. No other social network comes close, and almost all the other ad networks have shuttered. Instagram had a 100 million users, thats fine, but so did Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit and none of them have an ARPU like Facebook. You could make the argument that FB made Instagram, instead of the other way around.
Had Facebook been a bit more established in 2012, maybe gone public 2 years earlier, maybe they would have their own Phone OS.
[0] https://kagi.com/search?q=What+companies+did+Elon+Musk+start...
If that's your definition then technically he's not a founder.
Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.
Not impressive... You have some pretty astronomical standards.
I do agree about Facebook and Facebook not being in the same tier. Space X was a far harder company to build.
2. The first Roadster was shipped (to Musk, funny enough), 8 months before Elon became CEO. Let's be reasonable - I don't know how you can apply the founder/ceo label to a guy who was not ceo when their first product had already shipped.
There are plenty of stories (especially pre-Zuckerberg), or people starting companies, then being replaced by the board by a "real CEO" once they raised real money. These people are not founder/ceos. Google has a near identical path to Tesla; after Google's first real venture round, they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO, but Eric Schmidt is not the "founder" of Google.
I understand Elon has tied his public image to being the "founder" of Tesla; to the point that there was a lawsuit involved. However let's talk in plain terms here, he is not a founder of Tesla in binary terms.
Again, if it makes you feel better - you can read through my comments and note that I have never said anything qualitative about Tesla. I've said nothing about their growth, market cap, or Elon sleeping on production floors. I've simply said Elon was not a founder at Tesla, and therefore is not the group of people I think of as exceptional founder/ceos.
If you really wanted to steelman your argument, you'd be using SpaceX, which he did start, and was involved with before Tesla.
Depends on your definition of 'performance'. Does it include ethics?
VR/AR Threads AI
Probably missing some more..
And all the copycat divisions that melted away once the "template" companies he was copying, were bought out.
He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time.
I’m not sure either one makes him a great CEO but it did make him rich.
While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.
1. thefacebook
2. transition from desktop to mobile
3. building the machine that facebook became
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
but if you illegally slurp up data and make tons of money, you're the best at what?
Some of what you're remembering was Sheryl Sandberg's doing.
Zuck didn’t get the people he wanted despite literally offering billions. He then attached MSL to his other failed GenAI org which was already an astounding failure of leadership from the now triple headed team (wang, nat and zuck) which resulted in people fighting for budget, scope and prestige.
Meanwhile you have 1000x comp inequality among ICs and in some cases people getting 10x higher offers than others just because they happened to finish interviews a week later.
These people couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, good luck with AGI.
Gotta assume this was the plan all along. And would have been plan A if they weren't caught flat footed by chatgpt
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
You have to have these people that can speak these horrible languages, study for years unimpeded for likely no goal, can finance expeditions to the bottom of the ocean and fail again and again, sacrifice the right victims at the right times, etc. These people that will awaken Cthulhu have to be some of the most brilliant in human history (so says the lovecraftian mythos), and then they have to throw away all their brains and money and time to awaken the 'do not awaken under any circumstances' dark god of terror and soul consuming ambivalence.
Like, there isn't anyone out there that is that stupid. Totally breaks the immersion of the worldbuilding, right?
...right?
It's interesting how these conversations usually turn irrational, immediately.
TBD (LLMs / "super-intelligence")
FAIR (LeCun - JEPA and other long-term research)
Productization
Infrastructure
This happens to all companies that end up with - pardon my French - a shithole culture.
All the ethical quandaries where Facebook has been caught red handed. Over and over. Habitual denial of obvious problems.
The gross ineptitude and irresponsibility that facilitated actual genocidal coordination, in languages with no Facebook monitors. The consistently slippery talk we get from him via PR and Senate interviews.
And the deeply ethically challenged core business model of surveillance by any means not deemed illegal, and then some, as a means of individualizing the gaming of people's psychology - without transparent disclosure or a required opt-in.