Eyes are on Meta at the moment and Reuters is carrying a headline from an internal company town hall. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI agent development in the past four months hasn’t accelerated the way they expected.
The company is in focus this week after a report yesterday said they were considering selling excess compute. The implication is that they could be pivoting away from trying to build a foundational model.
Zuckerberg went big with at $14 billion acqui-hire of Scale and Alexandr Wang just over a year ago to lead LLM development. His first model was released in April and it hasn’t been successful. AI labs are now scrambling for high quality data. There’s evidence that Zuckerberg pivoted the company towards labeling data, removing software engineers from their jobs to painstakingly label data.
Meta has also been in focus for wrecking company culture through layoffs and reassignments and then promising snacks and a hackathon to try and fix it. Now in the town hall, Zuckerberg said that the company re-organization wasn’t as “clean” as they would have liked it to be.
He said in the town hall that top executives were worried early this year that “we weren’t going to move fast enough” on AI.
The hope in yesterday’s 10% share rally for META was that Zuckerberg might abandon the frontier already and get back to the thing that Meta is good at: Selling ads. Company revenue was up 30% last year and continues to accelerate but the free cash flow is being dumped into data centers.
Shares initially fell on the town hall headlines, adding to today’s losses, but they’ve since bounced back.
To me, it doesn’t sound like he’s anywhere near ready to give up as he said that best the company made on reog “haven’t come to fruition yet”.
Update: Zuck says that he still believes that long-term trends are still aligned with the basic shape of the company’s reorganization.
That doesn’t sound like he’s waving the white flag.
This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.
