Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, AI, and Throwing Good Money After Bad

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is upping the ante in the AI business, triggering a bidding war for talent and he’s willing to poach from competitors.

Why?

Well, like most of us, Mark is in hot pursuit of Godlike super intelligence.

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 4, 2025

Perfectly rational man in a perfectly rational society that has truly mastered rational resource allocation.

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 4, 2025

Ed Zitron summed up Zuckerberg’s recent moves and his overall strategy:

Mark Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for Scale AI, an AI data company, as a means of hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang to run his “superintelligence” team, has been offering random OpenAI employees $100 million to join Meta, thought about buying both AI search company Perplexity and generative video company Runway and even tried to buy OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s pre-product “$32bn valuation” non-company Safe Superintelligence, settling instead on hiring its CEO Daniel Gross and buying his venture fund for some fucking reason.

When you put aside the big numbers, these are the actions of a desperate dimwit with a failing product trying to buy his way to making generative AI into a “superintelligence,” something that Meta’s own Chief AI scientist Yan LeCun says isn’t going to work.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, my previous subject in this King Idiots of AI mini-series squealed like a stuck pig:

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 5, 2025

I really should quote a little from the NY Times piece I referenced above:

In April, Meta released two new versions of Llama, asserting that the models performed as well as or better than comparable ones from OpenAI and Google. To prove its claim, Meta cited its own testing benchmarks. On Instagram, Mr. Zuckerberg championed the releases in a video selfie.

But some independent researchers quickly deduced that Meta’s benchmarks were designed to make one of its models look more advanced than it was. They became incensed.

Mr. Zuckerberg later learned that his A.I. team had wanted the models to appear to perform well, even though they were not doing as well as hoped, people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Zuckerberg was not briefed on the customized tests and was upset, two people said.

His solution was to throw more bodies at the problem. Meta’s A.I. division swelled to more than 1,000 people this year, up from a few hundred two years earlier.

The rapid growth led to infighting and management squabbles. And with Mr. Zuckerberg’s round-the-clock, hard-charging management style — his attention on a project is often compared to the “Eye of Sauron” internally, a reference to the “Lord of the Rings” villain — some engineers burned out and left. Executives hunkered down to brainstorm next steps, including potentially ratcheting back investment in Llama.

In fairness to Meta, the NYT failed to mention that Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta, said that it’s “simply not true” that Meta trained its Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout models on “test sets.”

And if you can’t trust the fine folks at Meta, who can you trust?

But I don’t want to dismiss Zuckerberg too cavalierly.

I’m a serial sucker taking things at face value, investing based on business fundamentals and underlying product value, and betting on professional wrestling.

He’s a stone playa who read the true nature of this society at a very early age, from The Harvard Crimson, 2003:

The creator of the short-lived but popular Harvard version of the Am I Hot or Not? website said he will not have to leave school after being called before the Administrative Board yesterday afternoon.

Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy by creating the website, www.facemash.com, about two weeks ago.

The charges were based on a complaint from the computer services department over his unauthorized use of on-line facebook photographs, he said.

Zuckerberg said he will not be forced to withdraw or leave school for any amount of time, but declined to elaborate on whether the board took some lesser action.

…“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community,” Zuckerberg wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson earlier this month.

After taking it down, Zuckerberg decided that criticism of the site was too strong to re-post it.

“Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” he wrote at that point. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”

The site was created entirely by Zuckerberg over the last week in October, after a friend gave him the idea. The website used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the “hotter” person.

Students were ranked within the general Harvard community and individual Houses according to attractiveness.

Zuckerberg hacked into House websites to gather the photos, and then wrote the codes to compute rankings after every vote.

The programming and algorithms that made the site function were Zuckerberg’s primary interest in creating it, he said.

After creating the website, Zuckerberg forwarded the link to a few friends for advice.

But the link then was sent out on several campus group list-serves, and traffic skyrocketed.

In the course of one day, the number of visitors quadrupled—by 10 p.m., the site had been visited by 450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times.

The part I love about the story above is the way Zuckerberg is the only source quoted. Those Harvard educated journalists are allowed to be awful from the get.

She also didn’t report the blog post he put up the night he launched the site:

“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.

By the time of his 2018 congressional testimony Zuck had gotten some press training:

Zuckerberg, 33, paused and smirked. “No, congressman. FaceMash was a prank website that I launched in college, in my dorm room, before I started Facebook,” he said.

“You put up two pictures of two women and decided which one was the better, more attractive of the two, is that right?” Long asked.

Zuckerberg responded, with an emphasis on his youth at the time: “That is an accurate description of the prank website that I made when I was a sophomore in college.”

Ok, so he’s always been ruthless, shrewd and openly anti-social but I’m not sure he’s really that smart.

Social media had been pioneered by MySpace, Friendster and several other companies long before Zuckerberg allegedly stole the idea for Facebook from classmates.

Facebook primarily rose to the top because of three factors:

Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and ran it into the ground.
Facebook was honed for and marketed to the young elite and in an oligarchy, the road to mass appeal starts at the top.
Facebook forced users to confirm their identities rather than allowing them to hide behind online handles.

Since launching Facebook, his biggest wins have come from buying budding competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp more than from any internally created ideas.

Never forget, this is the same guy who spent $47 billion in five years on “the Metaverse.”

He clearly cannot tell a good idea from a bad one.

He’s explained his recent AI spending spree to investors (who have no ability to depose him) in April:

“The major theme right now, of course, is how AI is transforming everything we do.” At the same time, Meta upped its capital expenditures range for the year to between $64 billion and $72 billion from between $60 billion and $65 billion to reflect more data center investments in AI and potentially higher hardware costs.

What Zuckerberg didn’t say then is that he was about to start shelling out mounds of cash to revamp his AI organization.

“Mark Zuckerberg is in founder mode and he’s not going to be stopped,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in an interview on Friday with CNBC’s “Money Movers.” Luria has a buy rating on the stock, but said that to win in AI, Meta needs to be successful with the next round, with the dream team that they’re building.”

I had to include the hypersonic quote from D.A. that CNBC featured. I’m sure it made great TV.

It wouldn’t be American corporate media if it didn’t feature interchangeable hustlers competing to spout the most ridiculous nonsense in the most simplistic terms.

They’re all like a TV sportscaster talking to drunks at noon on a Sunday except with no contract and an urgent need to be invited back right away.

Also making me doubt Zuckerberg’s wisdom was his recent, much publicized decision to hire the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s CEO Dana White to be a board member for a reported seven figure stock and cash compensation package.

Although there was some logic behind that decision.

From The MMA Draw, a publication aimed at investors in the fight sports industry:

This well-planned and well-executed attention-getter kicked off Meta’s 2025 with a bang.

That’s right, Meta, a company with a $1.59 TRILLION market cap has brought America’s best-known fight promoter (and wife-beater) on their board of directors.

The collective “WTF?!?” spawned headlines and social media posts all over the Internet.

Based on this round-up of headlines from Google News, the mainstream media already has a theory and it has to do with a certain newly re-elected President celebrating a big anniversary on January 6th.

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 4, 2025

It’s also, according to The MMA Draw, part of Zuckerberg personally rebranding himself for the Trump era:

Reason #2: Zuck Is Getting Based2024 saw Mark Zuckerberg embark on what Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian called “a wider strategic overhaul of the tech mogul’s public image.” She also explained why Zuckerberg might be doing this:

Meta is embroiled in an anti-monopoly lawsuit and is being sued by dozens of states alleging that Facebook and Instagram are exploiting children to boost profits. Far better, don’t you think, that we all talk about how handsome a bearded Zuck would be rather than dwell on Meta’s less attractive business practices?

Honestly, it’s been a pretty incredible rebranding campaign for Zuckerberg, scoring wins by showing off his wakeboarding, flag-waving, and beer-drinking mastery.

Anyone who remembers Zuckerberg’s pathetic attempt to launch himself as a potential political candidate in 2017 should be impressed by how dramatically he’s improved his PR game.

He’s even gotten favorable notice from the Twitter fashion guy.

Zuck’s (seemingly genuine) fondness for training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has been a big part of this rebranding and a great excuse to pal around with Dana White.

Zuckerberg been talking up his love for BJJ since at least this 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Mark Zuckerberg on what he loves about BJJ: (It’s) a thing that is both super engaging physically but also intellectually and where you can’t afford to focus on something else. I think (it’s) the perfect thing because if you stop paying attention for one second you’re gonna end up on the bottom. So I’ve just found that is just really important for me in terms of what I do. Being able to maintain my energy level, maintain my focus… then after an hour or two of working out or rolling or wrestling with friends, now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day.

Zuckerberg has also medaled in a BJJ tournament and at one point even had Dana White calling up the Roman Colosseum looking for the right venue to host a bout between himself and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Naturally with 2020’s Zuckerberg, even the cage fight was vaporware.

Caveat: The Market, aka the most effective price discovery system ever invented disagrees.