Bottle Feeding
After roughly a year and a half of really, really pissing off his stakeholders, Facebook-turned-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally said something to make investors happy.
Bloomberg reports that in a call with investors on Wednesday, the sword-brandishing CEO promised, like pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley, to make Meta’s AI development a priority — a critical factor in his plans for 2023, which he’s apparently calling Meta’s “Year of Efficiency.” Probably a sound goal to pursue, considering that Meta spent 2022 burying $14 billion in the wildly underwhelming digital landscape that is the metaverse, meanwhile laying off entire towns’ worth of workers.
“We’re working on flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster,” Zuckerberg said on the call, according to Bloomberg, “as well as deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive.”
“There’s going to be some more that we can do,” he added, “to improve our productivity, speed, and cost structure.”
Lo and behold, Meta’s stock was up 24 percent by 11 AM the next day — which, per Bloomberg, was the biggest single-day jump that the company has seen in nearly ten years.
‘Atta boy, Zucko. Finally telling investors what literally all of them out there seem to want to hear.
Robots for Robots for Robots
Apparently, though, in the wake of Meta’s Zuckerberg-hating Blenderbot’s chaotic introduction back in August, Zuck reportedly didn’t spend the meeting focusing on any shiny new generative AI products. (Just as a quick check-in with Blenderbot, we just asked it if it “liked Facebook,” and it answered, “not really, too many people use it for drama and gossiping, so I stay away from it as much as possible.” It did, however, say nicer things about its boar-hunting overlord.)
Rather, per Bloomberg, Zucko told investors that, outside of that note about integrating helpful “AI tools” into engineering work, Facebook will be focusing on using AI to improve its content-recommendation algorithms — a move the publication says is focused on making users and advertisers both much happier.
And honestly? A lot of platforms are likely going to need to make some algorithmic changes in the coming months, considering that AI-generated content is about to flood each and every corner of the internet that it can possibly be deployed in — social media included — so glad to see Zuckerberg getting ahead of things. Gotta keep all the content-sifting robots tip-top, since the content-generating robots are only just getting started.
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