Awe and excitement took place at the Chase Center, an 18,000-seat sports and entertainment venue on the San Francisco waterfront.
Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest man in the world, sat on stage in a loose shirt and sported a broom, to continue his 20 years as head of Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Legions of nerds, startup founders, investors and Silicon Valley worker bees hung on every word. It was when the conversation – a live recording last week of the popular technology found – turned to how he sees the company and its employees that those ears began to ring.
Zuckerberg praised the brutal reduction he led in 2022 and 2023 Meta, when he got it. Get rid of it A total of 21,000 employees. “You want to keep things grounded,” he said, insisting on days when “you can have meetings in your head about the direction you want to go in”.
Eighteen months after the devastating bloodbath, Zuckerberg made it clear he was still focused on transforming the social media behemoth into “the leanest kind of big company we can be”. He added: “It’s a problem when you have a lot of people working on things that aren’t what you used to be.”
You can almost hear a group of rank-and-file technology workers in the crowd. Their industry is coming out of a brutal era, and not just for Meta. After their halcyon days during Covid, more than 470,000 technology workers have been laid off, according to data collected since 2022 by the website Layoffs.fyi. Meanwhile, capital investment in startups – sectors other than artificial intelligence – fell to $167 billion (£126 billion) in the first six months of this year, half of the amount invested in the same period in 2021.
Yet last week, Zuckerberg was still talking about adjusting the “dial” to find that sweet spot between cutting too much and being too much. His words carry great weight. For many startup founders and investors, he is the platonic idea of ​​a startup founder: a technically brilliant engineer who is also focused on success, a founder who turned his mature idea into a $1.3 trillion empire, where he is still there. sit on the throne.
He delivered his message of “skinny love” amid the heart-wrenching rise of artificial intelligence, which most people in the field would agree is the biggest technological change since the Internet. More than 50 percent of the 1,800 AI startups that last year received at least $1.5 million each were based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Many of them promise to change everything from call centers to the law, and what it means to humanity.
San Francisco startup HeyGen creates candid video clips for anyone who uploads as little as one minute of video footage. On the road, driverless robotaxis transport tens of thousands of people every week.
In pockets, the future has already arrived. The result is a heightened paranoia that is particularly acute on the West Coast because, of course, this is where the tools that threaten to replace many types of human work are developed. If one is cruel, it can say that technology workers are the authors of their own misfortune.
All of which leads to perhaps the most important question: do any of these AI tools work well enough to actually replace people, or to significantly increase the human capacity of companies that need more people. less to produce the same product? It is a difficult question to answer. David Cahn, an investor at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, a backer of technology companies from Apple to Zoom, has publicly warned against the inflation of AI. He claimed that pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI chips and data centers by Big Tech companies would mean generating at least $600 billion in profits from AI to justify the cost.
The landscape is changing: since the heyday of Covid, Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, has been a bloodbath, with 21,000 jobs on the way in 2022 and 2023.
JOSH EDELSON/AFP
“Beyond [OpenAI’s] ChatGPT, how many AI products are consumers really using today? he asked. Consider how much value you get from Netflix for $15.49 a month or Spotify for $11.99. In the long run, AI companies will need to value consumers in order to continue opening their wallets. “
His criticism came back to the surface last week when it emerged that OpenAI was in talks to raise $7 billion from a consortium led by MGX, an investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates, at a valuation of $150 million. .It was an unusual number for a non-profit company that only created a for-profit arm five years ago. But it also turns out that the company has exceeded 11 million monthly subscribers. In addition to licensing AI models to third parties, OpenAI is on track to bring in $4 billion in annual sales.
However, it is also burning through billions almost as fast as it can raise them – that $7 billion would bring its total fundraising to over $20 billion – because of the accounting costs of goes out to run her equipment.
Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence is growing of large companies reducing their spending on AI tools that are proving to be too bulky, prone to providing bad information, and unreliable to replace legacy systems.
However, the usual place in Silicon Valley, however, is almost optimistic, so investors focus on where it is already moving the needle. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the founder of “buy now, pay later” giant Klarna, said last month that he expects to halve the company’s 3,800-strong workforce by using AI to streamline roles. This comes months after he boasted of one chatbot – one built by Klarna at ChatGPT – that took on the work of 700 people.
Last week, Bank of America released the results of a survey of 150 equity and market strategies covering more than 3,000 companies worldwide. Analysts are equally divided on whether AI will be a net creator or destroyer of jobs. But they all agree that the pace of innovation is accelerating, and that productivity is much faster than the delayed revolution that the Internet finally unleashed. The bank said: “Chatbots that were as effective as 18-year-olds on the Internet a year ago are now showing intelligence close to college graduates, proving that investment in AI is producing effective programs.”
At the center of that revolution is Zuckerberg, who seems to have moved on to a new phase in his life. He wears his hair long. He is part of a long gold chain. He recently acquired a 287ft yacht, called Launchpad. Zuckerberg also isn’t too keen on apologizing for his company’s role in social revolution, instead he’s fully empowered to push it forward — and when it comes to AI, he plans to be right at the forefront. Meta has released the latest version of its Llama AI model, which is more powerful than recent versions of ChatGPT, although not the newest version, and, importantly, is free for others to use – or for companies to use. build new bots that are relentlessly improving. By doing what used to be the maintenance of human activity.
Life can be overwhelming for all of us.
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