Mark Zuckerberg spent the early years of the AI gold rush trapped in his own metaverse. After belatedly breaking out, Zuckerberg made a frenzied effort to catch up to other Big Tech corporations, plus startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, with alleged offers of nine-figure signing bonuses. His ploy was moderately successful, though it has not catapulted Meta ahead of its AI competitors.
Think of Meta’s AI strategy like a shitty DJ set at a rave: lots of turning dials up and down while seeking a positive crowd reaction. Do you like our slightly cheaper AI models? Ehh. Should we sell cloud infrastructure? Mehhhh. Do you like our pervert glasses? Muted cheers from pockets of ravers who aspire to harangue strangers at the park. What about creating AI-generated images based on other people’s public Instagram accounts? Boooo. (That obviously invasive feature lasted all of three days before Meta yanked it.)
As Meta sorts through a pile of haphazard consumer products, it’s also trying to differentiate itself and get its AI branding straight. Somewhat understandable, given how everyone else has obvious, exploitable baggage, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is lobbying for open-source models that threaten the long-term viability of Anthropic and OpenAI.
OpenAI is the pioneer of the industry, for better and mostly for worse—co-founder Sam Altman is regularly drawing unwanted attention to the organization’s increasingly iffy IPO valuation while struggling to explain away its endless spending. Anthropic is taking fire from every direction for being woke, for being closed-source and expensive, and also because CEO Dario Amodei is far from the level-headed moralist he often claims to be. Google and Microsoft are the behemoths force-feeding their models into search engines and apps; best-case, they are hoping that your annoyance at Gemini and Copilot turns to indifference followed by dependency. SpaceXAI is an absolute mess, but it does have a stranglehold on gamblers who treat the stock market like it’s one big DraftKings parlay. Chinese models, meanwhile, are rapidly gaining prominence because they’re much cheaper and more efficient.
Where does that leave Meta? It appears Zuckerberg and the company’s public relations team are turning up the dial on AI Optimism.
Last week, Zuckerberg released an advertisement purporting to represent Meta’s buoyant AI ethos. “We’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone,” he wrote. In the ad, a plain-speaking fella’s voice-over decries how “some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected. That it’s gonna leave us behind.” Good news, he says: “We couldn’t disagree more. Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Just as we’ve always done, we’re betting on people.”
In a follow-up Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg doubled down on a message of positivity and inclusion. The sixth-wealthiest person on earth, whose corporation controls platforms with roughly 4 billion monthly users, says he believes in “delivering personal superintelligence to everyone.” The op-ed was also a perfect platform to take some potshots at Altman, Amodei, and their respective organizations.
“It is surprising that the discourse from many of those who are developing artificial intelligence is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I don’t understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous.”
Zuckerberg, like Palantir’s Alex Karp earlier this month, is going knives out against Anthropic and OpenAI, whose AI-will-kill-us-all-unless-its-me-controlling-everything shtick is absolutely, transparently self-serving. Altman ruminates about best- and worst-case scenarios for superintelligence approximately once per week; it’s a way for him to build hype about AI products that otherwise are not dazzling consumers. Amodei swears he only pushes closed-source models because otherwise, dastardly China will beat us in the AI race and “achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people.” Left unsaid in his spooky “China wins the AI race” hypothetical is that Anthropic falters from its frontrunner status.
It does not take a genius, or a megalomaniac, to point out these discrepancies. Zuckerberg might even be less credible than Karp—though I don’t care to compare them in great detail—when he claims in his op-ed that he’s driven by “more people sharing greater prosperity, health and freedom.” That certainly sounds nice if you don’t think about it for more than five seconds.
Okay, I thought about it for six seconds. Zuckerberg believes that human prosperity will result from decentralized superintelligence, an outcome that requires OpenAI and Anthropic to implode. Do you know who stands to benefit in that scenario? Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
Did Zuckerberg think about “more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom” at his own company when it installed mandatory employee tracking software? What about when Meta reassigned thousands of its engineers to do monotonous AI tasks? What about two months ago, when Meta laid off 10% of its workforce? What about when he turned his Palo Alto compound into an allegedly illegal school so his kids wouldn’t have to be taught around Bay Area riff-raff? Or when he reportedly became one of Hawaii’s biggest landowners, so he could construct a compound complete with a bunker?
“Putting power in people’s hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress,” Zuckerberg wrote. Is that how he’d describe the content moderation jobs Facebook and its subcontractors doled out to workers who developed PTSD from categorizing the most disturbing images and videos on the internet? Is that how Zuckerberg’s buddy Alexandr Wang, now Meta’s chief AI officer, would talk about the “jobs” he “provided” in some of the world’s poorest communities? Check out this empowering passage about AI data annotation company Scale, which was cofounded by Wang, from Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI:
“One group of eight workers in North Africa said Scale reduced their pay by more than a third in a matter of months. At least one worker was left with negative pending payments, suggesting that he owed Scale money. When the group attempted to organize against the changes, the company threatened to ban anyone engaging in ‘revolutions and protests.’”
Scale eventually blacklisted contractors in Kenya, and did so via a cold, blanket email that their paltry income source was kaput, effective immediately. Not a great outcome for workers who rely on money to “pursue their aspirations,” but don’t worry: Zuckerberg says more jobs are coming from Meta and other benevolent AI providers. “[If] superintelligence is widely distributed, then I believe we will see more jobs in the future, not fewer,” Zuckerberg wrote.
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The “AI optimism” spiel might prove to be relatively effective in the short-term. I can easily see Altman and Amodei taking the bait and saying something apocalyptic that proves Zuckerberg’s point. But aside from landing a few barbs, Zuckerberg is going to run into the same problems as his competitors. He might even be creating more glaring issues for Meta. Not only is he just as self-serving as his peers—he’s also trying to occupy a deeply undesirable lane. The public is not “pro AI” or optimistic about its outcomes, which is part of why other tech leaders oscillate between “best technology ever” and “AI might destroy humankind.” They have selfish aims, but they’re loosely aware they can’t sing AI’s praises all the time. No one wants to hear that crap. Zuckerberg, it seems, is going to try for a nonstop positivity campaign anyway.
Funnily enough, Zuckerberg is well-aware that AI is unpopular. Otherwise, he and Meta wouldn’t have spent nine months secretly plotting with Louisiana lawmakers about the construction of a $50 billion data center; instead, Meta would have negotiated a potential deal in the public eye. As the New York Times recently uncovered, this gargantuan data center project has caused skyrocketing rent prices in nearby communities, where construction workers are swooping in and looking for housing. A 41-year-old woman was evicted from her trailer park home with a month’s notice when her rent jumped from $250 to $1,495 per month, the Times reported. “That was my home for over a decade,” she told the Times. “Not everyone is making Meta money.”
She, too, will be happy to learn that Meta will someday provide her with personalized superintelligence. Unless, of course, Zuckerberg’s conveniently rosy projections don’t materialize. I’d be curious to hear Mark “AI optimist” Zuckerberg’s explanation for why, if anything goes awry with Meta’s Louisiana data center, “everyone else took on most of the potential downside,” the Times reported. Zuckerberg “gave his company an escape hatch to get out of it years before its partners,” according to the same investigation.
That sure doesn’t strike me as an optimistic outlook on the AI industry. More so, it reads like a desperate, power-hungry hypocrite who’s still turning dials up and down, hoping something hits.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
Sam Altman was asked whether other companies—not just Hugging Face—could’ve been hacked by OpenAI. He shrugged and said, “I mean, there could be, yeah.”
DoorDash is beginning to hype up a drone delivery service called “DoorDash Air.” It does not sound imminent, but it has cleared some important regulatory barriers. I for one am excited for the first time I’m hit from above by an unknown substance, and cannot ascertain whether it’s bird poop or someone’s aioli dip.
eBay issued a statement apologizing to Ina and David Steiner, the founders of the site EcommerceBytes, for subjecting them to a terrifying harassment campaign in the late 2010s. The Steiners wrote critical posts about eBay, which did not go over well among former eBay executives and employees. “It began with anonymous, threatening Twitter DMs to the Steiners, then quickly escalated to deliveries to the couple’s home,” Wired reported. “These deliveries included a bloody pig mask, pornography, a package of fly larvae and live spiders, and another package containing live cockroaches. Other deliveries were themed around death, including a copy of a book about grieving a spouse and a funeral wreath from a local florist.” In addition to the public apology, the Steiners reportedly secured a $55.7 million settlement from eBay.
Every few months, a startup debuts a personal AI assistant that will remind you to brush your teeth, drink water, and eat food, but with personality. “Hey dummy, have you gone to the bathroom today?” That kind of thing. The latest example is Orchid, which released an ad where a 20-something couple who clearly should not be together has separate chats with their AI assistant about their anniversary. The girlfriend in the ad commands the AI assistant to remind her stupid boyfriend that he forgot their anniversary. The AI assistant does so, and then books a reservation for the stupid boyfriend. Then the couple has a nice anniversary dinner, despite the girlfriend knowing that her boyfriend didn’t remember their anniversary in the first place.
If you are on Facebook, he’s right.
A+ judgement by Zuck here, I can see why he’s successful