Zuckerberg, Chen said, has personally "hand-cooked" and "hand-delivered" soup to researchers he wanted to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn't a joke, the executive insisted. "It was shocking to me at the time," Chen admitted. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you must respond in kind. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his own recruits as he hopes to poach talent from Meta.
The toxicity of his products is exceeded only by his gormless demeanour (let he who is without sin, cast the first stone). Yet, even those who consider him an enemy of humanity must admit that Zuckerberg possesses a talented grasp on the fundamentals of technology trends. Despite the clinical efficiency of his businesses in spreading misery, or perhaps proof of how well the product has been engineered underneath the hood - offerings like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, it is fair to acknowledge, are tightly-built products.
One company removed from the platform is C'est La Vie, which claimed to be a longstanding jewellery retailer run by Patrick and Eileen in Birmingham but had a returns address in China. Mabel & Daisy, which used AI generated pictures of a mother and daughter and claimed to sell "timeless clothing" from a shop in Bristol, has also been removed from the platform after it was exposed for selling cheap items from a base in Hong Kong.
Meta's impressive, photorealistic digital replicas of real places built using its "Hyperscape" capture tech, which uses the cameras on a Quest 3 or Quest 3S VR headset to scan a room, have so far been solitary spaces. If you wanted to visit a virtual version of a room in your house (or of Gordon Ramsay's home kitchen), you could only do it on your own.
Meta plans to spend up to $72 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and has said spending will climb higher next year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this year that he'd rather risk "misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars" than be late to the development of superintelligence. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and privately held AI companies like OpenAI are logging record-breaking capital expenditures on all things AI.
According to internal documents revealed by Reuters, users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp see 15 billion ads a day promoting scams, from fake Trump stimulus checks to deepfakes of Elon Musk hawking cryptocurrency. The company reportedly knows this; Reuters said that its own trust and safety team estimated that one-third of scams in the US involved a Meta platform. So why hasn't Meta done more? Perhaps because these ads are apparently highly profitable, to the tune of $7 billion US or more a year.