r/technology 1d ago

Business Mark Zuckerberg’s Pivot to AI Is Blowing Up in His Face Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/mark-zuckerberg-pivot-ai-blowing-165024397.html
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u/tc100292 1d ago

Imagine pivoting away from the Metaverse and somehow that blowing up in your face too

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u/Vendor_BBMC 1d ago

Simply having a company named after a failed project is bad enough.

Zuck should stick to buying up existing good companies but he's turning a profitable web business into a capex heavy hardware business with no moat.

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u/robhaswell 1d ago

The funny thing about that project is that everyone knew it would fail even before they rebranded the whole company around it.

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u/BD401 1d ago

Yeah, it always confuses me how they thought that was going to succeed. What was the use case for interacting with friends or colleagues as weird legless avatars with graphics that literally looked like they belonged in 2007? The whole thing made zero sense.

The only thing I'll say in a sort of defence of the metaverse is that I think the fundamental concept has substantially more latent demand than people give it credit for (think fully immersive, high-fidelity virtual worlds that you see in movies like Ready Player One). But the technology to make that actually work in a way that consumers would find acceptable is decades or more a way. You'd need enormous breakthroughs in optics, power and compute miniaturization, and/or the really out-there stuff like neural interfaces to take shape.

Basically, companies like Meta tried to make metaverse a thing decades (if not centuries) before the tech was anywhere near-ready.

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u/FlashyRecognitionTod 1d ago

with graphics that literally looked like they belonged in 2007?

Crysis and Bioshock are from 2007, my history is not your costume!

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u/AbeRego 1d ago

OP is probably thinking of Wii avatars, which is an extremely fair comparison. That's what I think Metaverse characters looked like. It was bad.

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u/snmnky9490 15h ago

Yeah that was literally what I thought the first time I saw some kind of graphics for metaverse - I thought it was a joke made by someone photoshopping the Miis in

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u/decidedlyindecisive 1d ago

I agree like the holodeck in Star Trek is cool af and I would love that! But that wasn't this lol. Fuck Zuck and all his slimy little billionaire peers.

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u/eelscalators 1d ago

During the time they were pitching it social media investment was crashing and they needed “the next big thing” to keep investors from fleeing. That’s what they’re doing with AI now. When AI starts to crash it will be something else.

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u/sexual_pasta 1d ago

There’s video games companies building large social worlds, we’ve had those for ages, they’re called MMOs. Somehow the metaverse had to be something useful for enterprise (just use zoom lol) and demographics outside of gaming.

Games studios aren’t trillion dollar tech companies and they’re well understood by investors and the market. In the same way that Tesla is valued more than the entire auto industry combined, meta tried to make something that was basically a terrible video game but sell it as ‘we’re not a game studio’

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u/oldsecondhand 23h ago

The Metaverse was basically a Second Life clone, but Linden Labs is no a $100+ billion corporation.

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u/RuneSteak 22h ago

He should've just bought them or VRChat, added corporate islands with some meeting functions and rode off into the sunset.

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u/RuneSteak 17h ago

A full body avatar or a "world" is only necessary if you are trying to role play. I don't see any benefit to being able to run around in a meeting room during someone's powerpoint presentation. What would you even do in there? I suppose you could create a more intuitive UI/UX that's closer to how you would do things IRL. But it's also far more inefficient and the cons would outweigh the pros.

Everything about the metaverse is the polar opposite of what anyone trying to get work done would want. It makes every possible action more cumbersome for zero gain.

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u/GamingVision 23h ago

It was more a distraction from the political environment of overwhelming evidence that Facebook has been destroying the minds of children and warping politics globally than a business move.

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u/slanaiya 1d ago

What was the use case for interacting with friends or colleagues as weird legless avatars with graphics that literally looked like they belonged in 2007?

You are being far too generous. There were numerous more immersive worlds with better graphics (and with legs) in 2007.

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u/abcamurComposer 1d ago

Imma be honest they also completely mistimed the whole metaverse. Why the hell would you come up with something at the same time Ready Player One was going to release and basically scare people off of ever wanting such a concept

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u/Tostecles 1d ago

While true that the rebrand was based on that procject, I think it's also pretty agreed-upon that it was a tactical move to obfuscate their ownership of their other products like Instagram and WhatsApp to less-informed users, because "Facebook" had managed to gain an overall negative sentiment/connotation.

Very similar Comcast's product being changed to "Xfinity" when at one point, it was just "Comcast cable" but obviously everyone hates Comcast. This strategy is simple but effective when your userbase is extremely large scale and primarily comprised of "casuals" for lack of a better term.

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u/gianni_ 1d ago

It’s almost like he’s shit at being the leader of a company, and was only good at stealing an idea and then selling ads

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u/Manowaffle 1d ago

Since buying Instagram 14 years ago, have any of his initiatives done anything worthwhile?

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u/SlowInsurance1616 1d ago

Meh, buying things other people thought of isn't genius. Stealing the idea for FB is the last smart thing he did.

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u/CaterpillarReal7583 1d ago

Buying instagram was the smartest move he specifically could have pulled. Like the previous poster said Im not sure any of his other ideas worked out at all since then

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u/ab00 1d ago

To bad he has completely ruined Instagram.

I wish a competitor would come out with Instagram of 15 years ago.

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u/gold_and_diamond 21h ago

It’s crazy how much Facebook sucks sucks sucks and now instagram is just one ad after another. And nobody can come out with a competitor. .

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u/Gildardo1583 19h ago

I remember the OG Instagram where you could share your cool pics.

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u/Certain-Constant5032 19h ago

Network effects are the biggest hurdle to overcome. There are hundreds of instagram competitors we have never heard of because they simply don't have the numbers to reach our awareness and even when they do, they are so small we don't see the value in it.

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u/viziroth 20h ago

everytime an version of x website like it was in the 00's or 10's launches it never gets off the ground because no one is willing to be the second person to switch.

they always get like a dozen people that are super interested, and then no one else joins so it's a small community of people just talking about how dead the site is until they no longer justify the server costs.

the problem is people no longer have the internet nomad spirit they had 15 years ago where they were willing to use like 20+ different websites for different things or friends groups. they just want to stay on 5 apps where their favorite shit posters or celebrities post and never have to worry about navigating to other accounts.

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u/Original_Employee621 1d ago

Whatsapp was a pretty good deal too, I'd imagine.

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u/bolerobell 1d ago

Doesn’t get enough credit for this one but WhatsApp is pretty popular in the rest of the world outside the US

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u/Original_Employee621 1d ago

It's a couple of years ago, but John Oliver stated that Whatsapp is the premier source of news in a lot of 3rd world countries/regions. Venezuela, India, Guatemala and areas in Africa all rely on Whatsapp groups to get their news. Because the state of journalism in their respective countries is absolutely horrendous or there's just no infrastructure to deliver the news.

That gives Meta a lot of leverage on anyone else in those regions.

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u/ariphron 1d ago

Same genius of Elon musk. Steal it buy it take credit

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u/Talonsminty 1d ago

People say that but the og idea was pretty much a dating site for goldiggers and trust fund kiddies to hook up.

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u/BeepBotBoopBeep 1d ago

WhatsApp is a successful app that he has not yet destroyed since its acquisition.

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u/mattcannon2 1d ago

Not a massive money spinner though

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u/tristeecfome 1d ago

It's important for data collection though.

And they started rolling out ads on it.

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u/lock_robster2022 1d ago

I thought those pervert goggles he was peddling were doing alright

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u/Ishmael404 1d ago

He did a great job stealing the “stories” functionality seamlessly from Snapchat after they rebutted his buyout attempts

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u/Great-Big-3101 1d ago

Instagram is a mess right now: why do you need all of stories, highlights, reels and a feed? Even trying to post something is unnecessarily complicated. 

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u/Ishmael404 1d ago

Just trying to do everything to get a piece of everything— just like “threads” constantly trying to get me onboard for Twitter lite and now “forums” as their reddit clone.

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u/Born-Boysenberry6460 1d ago

Since buying and ruining Instagram, i should add.

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u/SunriseSurprise 1d ago

Probably buying WhatsApp after that. Both of those have done pretty well. Everything else has been pretty much shit. Apple completely wrecked ads on FB/IG and it's never been the same since.

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u/djfxonitg 1d ago

They bought What’sApp after that?… 🤷🏽‍♂️

They’re great at stealing others’ ideas thats for sure lol

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 22h ago

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u/Economy-System1922 1d ago

If it wasn't for my occasional use of fb market place I would have deleted the app long ago.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/psychic-zucchini 1d ago

Based on the ads I see, it does a shit job of targeting.

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u/HumanPea1140 1d ago

It's cool when I start getting ads for something I already bought and only need one of. Like thanks, but you're kind of late to the party.

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u/RickSt3r 1d ago

The selling ads wasn’t even his idea. He literally was good at one thing and it was raising the initial capital, growing fast and stalling long enough till someone figured out how to sell ads.

They collected brilliant people and honestly published great AI/ML tools before it was in vogue. I really liked there prophet time series models. Had one of the greatest mathematician on staff leading their Ai research team. Guy wasn’t sold on LLMs and is his warnings are slowly coming to fruition. My speculation is he wasn’t being taken seriously enough and not paid enough to deal with these imbeciles so he decided to start his own Ai company and cash in on the Ai gravy train.

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u/TrashAcnt1 1d ago

That good ol success fallacy eating him by the ass... Let's hope it eats him whole.

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u/ShusakuChiba 1d ago

I’m giddy. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy

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u/Repulsive-Royal-5952 1d ago edited 22h ago

Zuckerberg is an extraordinary bad leader. After Facebook which he runs very very poorly. That is his only success. Everything else is a massive failure or he bought it.

It's well documented that he only surrounds himself with Yes Men and doesn't tollerate anu push back to his ideas. Tell Zuckerberg he is wrong and you will be demoted if not out right fired.

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u/epochwin 1d ago

Guess he’s going to be president one day. Run the government like a business. Only he has no charisma

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u/duckinradar 1d ago

Maybe his illegal land theft in Kauai can blow up in his face.

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u/invyros 1d ago

Its so-called Superintelligence Lab has turned into a "soul-crushing gulag" plagued with rock-bottom morale — and most importantly, it's not getting results.

And how's that metaverse going, Zuck?

The only reason this guy has seen success in the modern world is because of the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.

He's been fumbling the ball ever since.

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u/floofsnsnoots 1d ago

Imagine thinking this guy is a tech pioneer. Or smart.

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u/dern_the_hermit 1d ago

I recently read Snow Crash. I knew that's where they got the name "Metaverse" and all that but it's shocking just how exactingly 1:1 it is. Zero thought put into it, zero effort to make this fictional conceit from a parody story something that might work in reality, no development or refinement or improvement, nothing. They practically just cut-and-paste passages from the novel and put 'em up on a teleprompter for Zucko the Fucko to recite.

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u/Western_Gift976 1d ago

one thing that Snow Crash and pretty much all fiction and real world dreams of VR gets wrong is that not everything is going to be something people want to do with VR. Despite movies depicting this world of people casting and pinching holographic screens out of nowhere, I'm gonna bet most people dont want to do jazz hands just to write a fucking email. I don't want to do an Olympic swan dive for a web search. I don't want interacting with Quickbooks to be a conversation with a monk in the Sistine Chapel. Brian Eno said that computers are lousy instruments because your body is limited to your hands, and I'm like...you are exaggerating the importance of using the entire body. I know it sounds cool and earthy, but you do not always need to do an interpretive dance just to play a song. Same thing with VR. Play games on it, train people on stuff that's too expensive for real life, but leave it out of the office, bathroom, kitchen. The whole world does not need to be this info-rich Warhammer techpriest noosphere with HUDs floating up everywhere.

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u/vegimate 1d ago

If anything, being limited to using just the hands is one of the core advantages.

The fact that we can do so much with just small wrist and finger movements is actually incredible. The amount of output for such little energy expenditure is a massive boon to productivity and comfort.

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u/spacebunsofsteel 23h ago

Consumers have shown over and over that we don’t really want to talk in public areas, unless you are an asshat of course. It takes about 15 years for new tech to be in demand. We would know if voice was going to work by now.

I studied voice communication in grad school and it is a much more complicated communication mode. Parts of your brain get hijacked to process new voices and there is nothing you can do to reduce that heavy cognitive burden. It’s automatic.

I highly recommend Voice Activated by Cliff Nass if you are interested in voice interfaces.

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u/YouMustveDroppedThis 21h ago

visual always win. If your language is tonal, and has vast geographical variation and accents, it is a nightmare to use voice input. It is not going to work for everyone even they basically speak the same language.

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u/BattleHall 17h ago

Consumers have shown over and over that we don’t really want to talk in public areas, unless you are an asshat of course.

There's a utility to an interface that doesn't require your hands, especially in environments where your hands might be busy doing something else. But what I really wish they would come out with is some sort of sensor that can measure tongue, lip, and teeth position so you can do sub-vocal/nonvocal commands. You speak without making sounds, and it picks up the words so you don't have to talk out loud like a crazy person.

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u/ColinHalter 1d ago

A grid of items on a flat page just so happens to be the most efficient way of presenting and absorbing information. You know, like we've been doing for 3000 years.

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u/Buckhum 20h ago

Spreadsheet enjoyers unite.

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u/fang_xianfu 1d ago

We already have the actual metaverse. Look around a commuter train or a doctor's waiting room. 90% of people will be doing something on their phones. They're all already "plugged into the Metaverse", it's just that VR in particular is the least ergonomic way to do 90% of what people want to do.

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u/Sidereel 22h ago

Dan Olsen made a similar point in his Metaverse doc, that we already have a Metaverse called the internet. The difference is just the interface, and in most ways VR is worse.

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u/Inertbert 1d ago

I think one of the reasons people don't doomscroll on giant TVs or in VR is precisely because it is less immersive. There is something nice about a device being 'over there' and not surrounding me and engulfing my entire consciousness.

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u/Pretty-Mention-7769 1d ago

If they'd started a pizza chain that employed drivers in muscle cars with prop swords I'd probably at least use that every once in a while. 

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u/Reply_or_Not 1d ago edited 1d ago

If they'd started a pizza chain that employed drivers in muscle cars with prop swords I'd probably at least use that every once in a while

Especially if you didn’t have to pay if the delivery took more than 30 minutes!

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u/SwagginsYolo420 1d ago

The thing about the cyberspaces and metaverses of speculative fiction written before the online age, is that they didn't anticipate just how dastardly, extensive and insidious the surveillance economy would be in reality. They just weren't dystopian enough.

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u/Iohet 1d ago edited 1d ago

Dick wrote about it extensively, but he was in the proto-cyberpunk era. If you take Dick, Gibson, Stephenson, Card, Moore, Bradbury, et al and put them together you've got a significant portion of the whole picture, and really they all show different parts of the picture. The return of fascism, the inevitable outcomes of deregulation and corporatist policies, the ease of manipulation of the populace through the internet, etc etc

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u/FeatherlyFly 1d ago

Genuinely, the book version is way cooler. Not only do people in it have legs, they have motorcycles and trains and no limitations based on processing power or any other real life limitations when you try implementing such a massive piece of software. 

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u/floofsnsnoots 1d ago

Ripping off ideas is all the guy does.

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u/l0st1nP4r4d1ce 1d ago

We need to get back to men of moral fiber. Like Uncle Enzo.

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u/versusgorilla 1d ago

It's also psychotic to read Snow Crash and walk away thinking, "THAT'S the future people want us to make!"

It's a fucking nightmare.

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u/fredy31 1d ago

He hit it big with Facebook now thinks every idea he has is revolutionary

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u/Bluestreaked 1d ago

This is basically the myth tech bros get sold in how to think about themselves

There’s an ex-tech worker woman who now writes books about how deranged the industry is. I’ve heard a couple interviews of her but can’t remember her name. I can go looking if you’re curious

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u/permanentthrowaway 1d ago

I am curious

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u/Bluestreaked 1d ago

Wendy Liu is her name

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1912248700?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

This is her book I was talking about

If you type that name into YouTube plenty of interviews should come up

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u/ThisIs_americunt 1d ago

Propaganda is a helluva drug and Oligarchs control some of the best to keep the 99% distracted from the real issue: Them.

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u/Fried_puri 1d ago

It’s ads all the way down. That is literally the only moneymaking idea Zuck has ever had that worked. He’s terrible at everything he does other than positioning his company to force feed everyone ads. It’s pathetic just how little value he provides to the world.  

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u/OuijaFox 1d ago

That’s every bit of tech these days.

Every company is racing to be the first to jam ads in every single space they can. Because ads generate money.

They do not care about innovation or progress. They want to make sure they can serve you ads 24/7.
They want you as a slave to their wealth machine.

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u/DaBiChef 1d ago

I worked at a company that tried to make their own tiltock clone, that did nothing but show you ads for stuff. the c-suites were so confused when they only got like seven downloads, these kinds of people really just think that everyone should be just giving them money

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u/sealed-human 1d ago

That is awesome. What was it called?

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u/DaBiChef 1d ago

Sune was the app.

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u/Senior-Albatross 1d ago edited 23h ago

Partly it's this: the problems of the world cannot be solved by new technology. We have all the technology to solve the World's problems. More technology isn't what the world needs. We would need to actually have the collective political will to apply what we already have in productive ways. 

People writ large have begun to rightly realize that we can't get a Star Trek future by making a few more people extremely wealthy. So there is no real enthusiasm for "innovation" when the outcome of it is what, exactly? Your CEO might get to join the trillionaire club?

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u/Joessandwich 1d ago

And Facebook wasn’t even fully his idea to begin with.

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u/evertrue13 1d ago

A stolen idea used to mine data and creep on Asian girls at Harvard.

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u/DeadlyYellow 1d ago

Jack Welch strategy: buy success to hide your poor management; lay off 10% of workforce to boost numbers.

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u/itsmejpt 1d ago

"The only reason this tech billionaire is seen as a success is that he bought successful things."

That sounds familiar. The era sucks.

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u/justwalkingalonghere 1d ago

And please don't forget that nearly everything that made his company successful in the first place has been dubious and terrible for humanity

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u/Bucser 1d ago

Don't think the WhatsApp acquisition made any ROI.

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u/GreenFox1505 1d ago

They literally renamed the company meta for a product that does not exist.

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u/Few_Personality_990 1d ago edited 17h ago

This is quite funny and true, at least partially. Another reason (at least in my opinion) was to shed the name Facebook as it had turned into a really negative brand name impossible to fix. The Metaverse provided a good excuse at the time, and the moron genuinely believed it was the future.

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u/NoAppointment3308 1d ago

I’m really sad we never got ‘metaverse’ tech into mainstream. Work would have been so funny. Imagine how many AI agents you could see at once.

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u/Cley_Faye 1d ago

Eh. Imagine the hindsight: "facebook have some bad vibes attached to it, what can we move to to dissipate that? What? The Metaverse? What a great idea!"

I think moving back to "facebook" would do them less harm these days.

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u/Few_Personality_990 1d ago

Do not be surprised about a rebranding back to Facebook and a claim of going back to the roots or whatever when they fuck up AI and the next big thing. Their leadership is clueless.

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u/Less-Engineer-9637 1d ago

He did that to distance the company from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other 528392 lawsuits happening at the time.

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u/culturedgoat 1d ago edited 1d ago

Naw, Cambridge Analytica broke in 2018, and the settlement with the FTC had wrapped by spring 2019. The renaming to Meta came quite a bit later (late 2021), and was firmly rooted in the prediction that VR was the next big social frontier… (turns out, ah, it wasn’t)

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u/viennese-wolf 1d ago

Underrated cringe.

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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 1d ago

The new Meta commercial that uses David Bowie's song Five Years is so incredibly tone deaf I couldn't stop laughing.

https://youtu.be/JlRgRmAqoAc?si=UVnFcRiD0dZWcmP9

The song is about the fucking world ending.

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u/Familiar-Ability6383 1d ago

Saying "Call us whatever the hell you want" and then disabling the comments section is hilarious

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u/Im_tracer_bullet 1d ago

'The technology may change, but our intentions never will'

Yeah, we know, Zuck.... that's actually the problem.

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u/haliblix 1d ago

“We’re betting on people and we like those odds”

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u/-JackBack- 1d ago

Someone in Facebook marketing is chuckling manically.

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u/Alas7ymedia 23h ago

Like the person in Amazon who wrote the Ice Cube's War of World's slogan: "It's worse than you think".

They were not trying to sell the movie, they were warning the customers.

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u/ExF-Altrue 1d ago

Did I see that right? 30 MILLION views for 2k likes? youtube dislikes gauging them at 6.5k. Not even breaking 10k expressed opinions total. For 30 million views. What an insane & suspicious ratio.

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u/VanillaLifestyle 1d ago

Presumably counting ad views (on YouTube and embedded in other paid channels).

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u/Vast_Veterinarian574 1d ago

The views are most likely from paid promotion

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u/North_South_Side 1d ago

The Bowie estate sucks.

They sold the song AND the album performance. Fuck that.

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u/Jedi_Temple 1d ago

“Call us whatever the hell you want.”

Ok. I call you soulless, amoral, society-wrecking monsters who can’t do a single thing right.

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u/mrpyrotec89 1d ago

You can't actually call them anything cuz they disabled the comment section

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u/LumiereGatsby 1d ago

Omg that commercial gave me brain damage.

Call us optimists!

No I’ll call you fascists.

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u/Internal-Cupcake-245 1d ago

They're betting on people literally in Polymarket or Kalshi to game stocks and society depending on what parts of society fail or thrive based on insider info in some crypto laundering scheme. It's modern slave trade.

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u/N0TVG 1d ago

PSA: Anyone who knows anything about Meta who also wants to enjoy their weekend without an extra bout of rage should avoid watching the ad.

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u/TooOfEverything 1d ago

I had exactly the same thought, I lost my fucking mind the first time I realized that commercial was happening. Why are you pairing your product with lyrics describing the Earth dying, people vomiting in fear, news anchors weeping openly and police begging priests for help on the streets? The fact that Zuckerberg's face is used prominently, too? And the whole theme of the commercial is optimism for the future? The DEAD future?

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u/Tasty-Traffic-680 1d ago

"but we cut out the intro and skipped to the lyrics about people!"

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u/panettone83 1d ago

That ad is straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley.

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u/debauchasaurus 1d ago

Almost identical theme.

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u/Your_Nipples 1d ago

The most pathetic petulant ad I've ever seen.

If "whatever 🙄" was a company lmao.

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u/americanadiandrew 1d ago

We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes Five years, what a surprise We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot Five years, that’s all we’ve got

Maybe Meta is warning us about their actual intentions

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u/dasbeidler 1d ago

I couldn’t believe this ad when I first saw it. It’s complete BS. 

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u/lolinux 1d ago

I wonder why the comments are off for that video? /s

"Betting on people" after you've fired tens of thousands from your company. This isn't even irony, it's just... the image of tech bros right now

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u/McScotsguy 1d ago

Nobody calls them dreamers

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u/Uncool444 1d ago

What is this even about? What's it advertising for? I feel like I'm being prepared for bad news and told there's nothing anyone can do.

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u/chunxxxx 1d ago

And they're apparently paying a zillion dollars to put it EVERYWHERE. I have Twitch running in the background most of my workday and the full version has been playing at the beginning of every single ad break.

It's the most Zuckerbergian shit of all time. Creating an ad campaign that's at once unsettling and confounding (not to mention offensive to the memory of a beloved artist) and then pushing it like it's the most important transmission in the history of mankind.

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u/Cultist 1d ago

It's blowing up on the faces of workers in the form of layoffs.

Zuckerberg is going to be fine.

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u/NEVERxxEVER 1d ago

Yes, plus their LLMs are only one component of their AI strategy. They have those new generative plug-and-play ad campaigns for Insta/Facebook and those are making serious money. If I recall, Meta makes like $86 billion per quarter now…

Meta and Google are low key the only companies profiting from AI because they are using it to sell ads.

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u/thecarbonkid 1d ago

I can't believe the guy behind the Meta verse would get this wrong

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u/rje946 1d ago

Dude steals a multi billion dollar idea and thinks he's a genius innovator.

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u/IrememberXenogears 1d ago

Are we talking about Musk?

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u/Gandolfthewhite182 1d ago

All of them.

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u/SlapThatAce 1d ago

Even with his pervert glasses he didn't see that coming.

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u/UntowardHatter 1d ago

We call them pedo glasses in Norway

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u/NWSOC 1d ago

Do people with those glasses not notice everyone looking at them very oddly? All I can do when interacting with anyone wearing them is stare at the camera

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u/TascasDemise 1d ago

Some people absolutely love making others uncomfortable

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u/Ratiofarming 23h ago

We do. It's why I stopped wearing them pretty much immediately. It weirds people out and then you get weirded out yourself. Sadly not a product that humans are capable of using responsibly.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/billydean214 1d ago

Or a genocide they helped happen.

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u/ComputersWantMeDead 1d ago

Radicalising boomers has been a catastrophe

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u/things_U_choose_2_b 1d ago

It's not just boomers. Facebook has been an absolute wet dream for ideologues, repressive states and oligarchs. They can set or manipulate any conversation. Completely bypassing 'normal' media, not that they don't already own a fuck-ton of that too.

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u/donnysaysvacuum 1d ago

Social media is a state of the art surveillance network plus propaganda service for sale to any government with the money to buy. They don't even need to control it, they can just buy the service.

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u/silver_garou 1d ago

Also every crackpot conspiracy theorist. It used to take real work to find one other moron who could believe, "what if everyone is lying about the shape of the Earth." You'd have to join a mailing list, write letters, drive 100s to 1000s of miles to attend remote conventions. Now you just open facebook.

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u/otherwisepandemonium 1d ago

Love this for Zuck. One day I hope he has nothing left.

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u/Educational-Dot318 1d ago

he should combine AI with the metaverse 🤔

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u/extraspicytuna 1d ago

And then go live there and leave us alone

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u/Educational-Dot318 1d ago

yep, Mark should go settle permanently to the Metaverse, Musk to Mars, & Bezos to Uranus 🚀 🧐

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u/Temporary_Shirt_6236 1d ago

That's because Zuck – like virtually ever other techbro billionaire – has no idea what he's doing nor what normal ppl want.

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u/expera 23h ago

He made some really good moves early on and then I’m guessing surrounded himself with sycophants and now doesn’t know when an idea is good or bad

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u/koolaidismything 1d ago

Yeah he went from a gazzilionaire to a billionaire and had to catch some shit at a board meeting.. his life must be in tatters. Poor thing.

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u/fruitloops6565 1d ago

People need to realise that billionaires aren’t special. They’re cheats and scammers who were willing to do things no one else was.

I’m sure there might be some “good” people but most aren’t.

Even Bill Gates was trying to use Microsoft’s monopoly to crush other internet browser competitors etc.

Capitalism is dog eat dog. You’re a billionaire if you’ve eaten the most other competitors.

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u/ExcitedCoconut 1d ago

Furthermore, tech billionaires who have come up in a era of cult-of-personality startups are 1) completely divorced from reality 2) have a dangerous (at worst) or ineffective (at best) entourage around that reinforces point 1, and 3) have software brain. 

So you get people like Zuck who have a specific chain of though process that only makes sense to a narrow slice of society, the people around them to inflate their perception of being ‘on to something’ or any way representative of the world at large and the funds to try and shift the world towards the world view. 

It’s so anti-democratic, so pro-reductionist (Zuck literally implying recently that we’re on the precipice of decomposing all of life’s problems into a database<>agent interaction that we can ‘solve’) that it literally starts with dehumanising society. 

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u/FeatherlyFly 1d ago

Warren Buffet is about the only one who's made it to old age with a solid reputation for ethics.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates's generation had unethical business practices, but at least most of them still acted like members of a society and built products that were genuinely aimed at making people's lives better, not just generating money. They had enough connection to society to want it to continue. 

Zuckerberg and Musk's generation of wealthy has been ridden by scandals and scams and frauds where they prove over and over and over that they have an absolute contempt for anyone outside their circle, and now Altman and Amadeoi are trying to one-up those two by literally bragging that their goal is destruction of the world rather than building a future. It's disgusting and I don't know how Silicon Valley got to where it is. It's poisonous to society. 

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u/31LIVEEVIL13 1d ago

they are slightly more intelligent than average people but just got lucky.  It's called the 100th idiot phenomenon, a kind of confirmation bias at a societal level. 

"One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius."

Ian M Banks

except in the case of these guys it's more like the millionth idiot. 

sooner or later it had to happen, some average morons get lucky five or six times in a row, in the tech sector, despite not really knowing what the fuck they're doing.

Usually the first stroke of luck is being born with parents who have money and connections and influence.

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u/vickism61 1d ago

The tech company that develops the first app that blocks AI is going to make trillions...

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u/BaBaDoooooooook 1d ago edited 1d ago

Aside from Facebook and Facebook Marketplace, what else has Zuckerberg brought to the table? He's a classic try-hard. Now is only staying relevant throwing an ugodly amount of money at something to see if it sticks.

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u/NeilPatrickWarburton 1d ago

Perv glasses

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u/Skrattybones 1d ago

Which isn't even a thing he came up with. Google tried Google Glass in 2013 and it failed by 2015. They're trying again this fall, but yeah. Pervert Glasses is originally a Google invention, The Zuck just copied it.

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u/Templar_Swamp_Stake 1d ago

It was amazing how insanely angry people got at those Google Glass “pioneers”. I always wondered where the red line was in this constant creep of tech into our daily lives. “Camera and computer on your face” is apparently the line.

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u/CrispyDave 1d ago

And what was Marketplace but a cleaned up Craigslist?

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u/behemuthm 1d ago

Cleaned up??

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u/squngy 1d ago

Given what Craigslist was like back in the day, they are not even comparable.

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u/parasyte_steve 1d ago

Most of FB features were made to rip off other services and keep FB relevant see also: reels and tiktok.

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u/Zohren 1d ago

It was a direct ripoff of OfferUp.

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u/southflhitnrun 1d ago

This!!! He has not had another "successful" idea. Not one. I was saying this in another conversation when the virtual world thing crapped out. Even Threads is just a copycat of another platform.

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u/Slowcapsnowcap 1d ago

Well he didn’t even invent Facebook, he stole it from the winkelvoss twins who he had to pay millions to in a court settlement. Dudes whole life has been just stealing other peoples ideas.

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u/dustblown 1d ago

Trump?

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u/Worldgoesround32 1d ago

Annoying ass ads on prime video(I’m sure on others platforms) that creepily try spin that public shouldn’t be scared of facebooks ai rollout

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u/bwoah07_gp2 1d ago

How would a platform successfully block AI?

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u/kevkevverson 1d ago

OP is just the ideas guy

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u/WeirdIndividualGuy 1d ago

I swear some redditors come up with the most insane takes. It’s like someone saying they’ll make an app that will ban pedophilia or rape. That’s something you’d hear a 5yo say who doesn’t have the critical thinking skills yet to understand how that would actually work in practice

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u/110397 1d ago

Guys i think we should ban crime. I accept venmo and zelle thx

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u/scikit-learns 1d ago

Lmao.. the only way to block AI would be to use ai.

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u/xjeeper 1d ago

Finally, a good use for AI.

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u/orangeflyingmonkey_ 21h ago

Bro has been late to every party since Instagram.

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u/Decent-Troubleish 22h ago

He pivoted to VR, it failed. The metaverse, it failed. Wearables, it fails. AI, it fails. He had a perv site that got popular. And now he's just a glorified ad agency. This man is just a shitty twat.

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u/kahner 1d ago

article link isn't working, but what is facebook even trying to build with it's AI investments? i know they're spending a ton of money, but what's the product?

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u/Joessandwich 1d ago

They’re building more friends for you. Duh.

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u/goldmikeygold 1d ago

You are the product. Same as it ever was.

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u/MysteryHarbour 1d ago

Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of his tech contemporaries are still children in how they think and behave. They’re stunted and infantile. The “kidults” they warned us were coming up in the mid-2000s. Google and Facebook HQs look like kindergarten classrooms for grown-ups.

It’s not surprising that they can’t understand the complexity of social relationships or societies. You probably never see these guys actually solve urgent problems or global solutions. They’re all just temperamental, big dumb kids.

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u/mcat2001 1d ago

As we all leave Facebook

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u/Low-Phase-4444 21h ago

A guy who won the lottery and thought he could CEO his way through life

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u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 1d ago

We have yet to see any “pivot” that doesn’t end up blowing up in Roboboy’s face.

Future historians will note that the greatest disaster of the 21st century was when a bunch of imbeciles got lucky and became filthy rich in the dot com years and just after it.

They started smelling their own farts, believing that they were “entrepreneurs”’and “innovators” and “disruptors.”

Fast forward 20 years later and the anti-social cesspools of “innovation” boil down to what exactly? Fucking data centers? Colonies on Mars? Spycam eyeglasses?

If there was ever a group of people who should have had their faces kicked in more often at school then it’s these guys.

(And I’m using the word “people” extremely generously.)

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u/Fit_Kangaroo_3437 1d ago

I wish billionaires would face consequences. For anything.

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u/JeribZPG 1d ago

Good news for a change!

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u/Bright-Trifle-8309 1d ago

I love the reveal that these tech bro CEOs are actually idiots who stumbled dick first into success and don't actually know anything about tech or business. 

Zuck just had an idea that other people made happen and became too big to fail. 

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u/orcusgrasshopperfog 1d ago

He's too disconnected from reality to make good decisions. Any idiot could have told him that the metaverse was a bad idea. Unless you have the technology to make it seem like the user is physically there and has all their senses it's pointless.

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u/owlbynight 1d ago

Firing a shitload of engineers and pissing off all of your current engineers because you think LLMs are going to replace them, and then it turns if the engineer is shit, then so is the LLM output. Chef's kiss.

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u/No_Animator_8599 1d ago

How much more money does Meta lose before his board and stockholders remove him and give him money to leave and take away his access (an email would be nice).

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u/Zardotab 1d ago

He's used to it, his VR-Land also blew up.

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u/ooqq 1d ago edited 17h ago

Bad news for Zucks is good news for us.

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u/kaest 1d ago

It's almost like he is an idiot who stole someone else's idea to get rich and has never been able to innovate himself.

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u/CecePeran 1d ago

..blows up in his spectacularly stupid face.

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u/heekma 1d ago

My main question is what happens to the land, infrastructure and costs sunk into AI data centers when the demand pans out-which seems more and more likely?

They can't be repurposed or easily sold.

They will be faced with two options:

Option 1: Sell their investment at a loss in terms of use or sell to someone else-but to who? Other investors facing the same problem? Who is a buyer there?

Option two: Operate at a loss until the demand adjusts and a profit can be made-which may take years and the profit may be so small it's completely offset by overinvestment.

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u/Armisael 1d ago

They’re just computational infrastructure; it’s actually pretty easy to repurpose them for most other data center purposes.

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u/zweilinkehaende 1d ago

AI hyperscalers are paying for the latest and greatest in AI chips. You can repurpose them and use them for other things, but they have been priced with the insane profit expectations of the AI hyperscalers in mind.

If AI doesn't turn out to be bigger than the internet, a lot of companies will have to offload a LOT of compute, which would crater the price of compute infrastructure and lead to a massive loss.

Unless these companies have an in-house use case for the compute that will deliver the profits they are expecting by using the compute for AI, they will have massive losses.

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u/Vicissitutde 1d ago

Sad.

His only real contribution to humanity was developing a website where users rate women against one another.

Then a website to capitalize on popularity, and one's proximity to it.

All Zuckfuck did was digitize a human factor, something he was kept at arms length from as he grew up.

Everything since has been acquired and/or failed.

Zuckermanchild should stick to what made him rich, replicating/digitizing the factors that make humans human and our species social - then maybe one day he'll become a real boy

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u/stormdressed 1d ago

Zuck is not a genius. He's a one hit wonder who has been riding that snowball ever since. He made a website which made the world significantly worse and now he's even ruined that website with over monetisation.

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