Apparently, Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been up to more than just making the rounds on the podcast circuit.
In recent months, the man behind the company that runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Oculus has been on seemingly every manosphere podcast out there.
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In May, he debuted yet another new look on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, where he talked about how college doesn’t do a good job of preparing people for their careers.
In January, he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to speak about online censorship, the Covid vaccine, bots on Facebook, and encrypted messaging, among other things.
More recently, he spoke with Ben Thompson of Stratechery about AI and where he sees social media going in the future.
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While the interviews are great at increasing Zuckerberg’s profile, they don’t do much to move the needle for investors looking for Meta to debut its next big thing.
For years, Zuckerberg’s focus was the metaverse, but after tens of billions of dollars and years of development, the project hasn’t gained the user base Meta was hoping for.
Meta’s Horizon Worlds virtual social platform had less than 200,000 monthly active users shortly after its launch in 2022, well short of the company’s expectations of 500,000 users.
Meta has shifted its focus to AI growth in recent years, and on Tuesday, a new report shows just how serious the company has become about topping its rivals.
Image source: Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Meta commits nine figures to hire top AI minds
Mark Zuckerberg is applying the same focus he brought to building the metaverse to building out Meta’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
Zuckerberg is personally overseeing the creation of a “superintelligence” team, and the company is offering nine-figure compensation packages to attract top talent, according to a Bloomberg report.
He believes Meta can beat competitors like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI to achieve artificial general intelligence. AGI is the theoretical limit of what AI can achieve — machines performing tasks as well as, or better than, humans.
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Bloomberg reported that the superteam will feature about 50 people, most of whom Zuckerberg will recruit personally. He’s arranged the desks at the company’s headquarters so the new staff will sit near him.
The team is only one aspect of Meta’s AGI strategy.
According to a report in The Information on Tuesday, Meta is close to finalizing a $15 billion investment in Scale AI. If completed, the deal would become the company’s largest-ever acquisition.
Scale AI provides training data to everyone from Microsoft to Google to OpenAI. The investment would give Meta a 49% stake in the company, and CEO Alesandr Wang would join the superteam.
Meta’s push for AGI comes at a cost bigger than money
The push for artificial intelligence that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans will inevitably lead to societal upheaval.
The most immediate concern is about the jobs that will be lost to automation.
When big companies like Meta and Alphabet want to save on costs, headcount is often one of the first places they look.
Meta is currently laying off about 3,600 employees, whom the company says are underperforming.
The company says it is eliminating redundancies, and it’s true the tech sector went on a hiring spree during the pandemic. Now, however, it is replacing many of those positions with machine learning engineers.
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence focused on enabling machines to learn from data without explicit programming from humans.
In other words, Meta has been laying off workers to hire other workers to build products, which will eventually lead to more layoffs.
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