Megan Bobrowski (2:24)

Well, it's very Meta. Right? They're building these AI products that they want billions of people to use. And the way they're doing that is by trying to get their workforce to adopt AI to build the AI. So, AI to build the AI.

Commentator/Analyst (2:41)

Where does Meta stack up in the AI world right now? And how hard would you say it's fighting to catch up?

Megan Bobrowski (2:48)

Yeah, so those are two different things. Where it is, it's not the best. How hard is Trying might be trying the hardest of any of the companies.

Ryan Knudsen (3:03)

Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan knudsen. It's Tuesday, April 28th. Coming up on the show, how Meta is going all in on AI.

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Ryan Knudsen (4:34)

Meta started an AI research lab in 2013. But in the last few years, Meta's AI tools have trailed behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which have been making big strides developing AI chatbots that can do research, write cover letters and even code. Last year to try and up its game, Meta started poaching top AI talent with huge offers.

Tech Industry Reporter (4:59)

Meta now notching another name in its expensive hunt for AI talent. Poaching atop Apple Executive.

News Reporter (5:05)

Coming from the buzziest and earliest AI

Megan Bobrowski (5:07)

native firms, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind. Meta finds itself sort of racing to catch up, right? And so they were giving out hundred million dollar offers to researchers trying to basically like rebuild this team and become

Industry Analyst (5:22)

competitive multi year deals worth $300 million. These are for scientists and engineers.

Ryan Knudsen (5:30)

This is wild. It's like NBA superstar money with some

Industry Analyst (5:34)

of them receiving $100 million straight up in year one. $100 million.

Megan Bobrowski (5:39)

Wow. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so they build this new team, they hire Alexander Wang from Scale AI and they basically just like redo their whole AI efforts from scratch.

Ryan Knudsen (5:51)

Wang and his team have developed the most powerful AI model Meta has produced so far. It's called Muse Spark and it was launched earlier this month.

Megan Bobrowski (5:59)

The new model is competitive with OpenAI and Google and Anthropic. It's not the best model, but it's good enough to keep them in the race. And they've sort of proven that, like, hey, we're still here, we're still fighting, we're still in it. Don't count us out. And now they're trying to race to get ahead to the frontier.

Ryan Knudsen (6:23)

Meta AI, as its chatbot is known, is designed to compete with chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. And it's baked into the company's existing apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. And compared to some of its rivals, Meta has a key advantage. It already has a huge potential user base.

Megan Bobrowski (6:42)

Meta has 3.5 billion daily users around the world.

Ryan Knudsen (6:46)

That would be a lot of people

Commentator/Analyst (6:47)

that could use the chatbot.

Megan Bobrowski (6:48)

It's a lot of people that could use the chatbot. Exactly. And so, you know, investors and analysts argue that meta has the distribution. That's not the problem. Right. Like, if you're Claude or you're ChatGPT, the companies behind those chatbots, you're trying to grow, you're trying to get people to use these things. But, like, you're starting from scratch. Like, you don't already have a user base. Meta already has a huge, huge user base. And so what they're trying to do is more about getting people to adopt this chatbot. That's what their kind of unique problem is that they're trying to solve.

Ryan Knudsen (7:20)

Meta hopes to use its AI chatbot as a way to supercharge its already highly profitable ad business.

Megan Bobrowski (7:26)

In December, Meta started using your conversations with their chatbot to target and show you ads on Instagram.

Ryan Knudsen (7:35)

For instance, Megan is going on a trip to Japan soon, and if she uses Meta AI to research and plan her trip, the company can use that information for targeted advertising.

Megan Bobrowski (7:46)

So I talk to the chaperon, I'm like, hey, what are some good temples to see in Kyoto? And so if I, you know, use those conversations that I had met, I can take that and start showing me ads for things in Japan on Instagram now that I might want to click on. I might. Maybe it's tours, maybe it's restaurants to go eat out, whatever it is. And so they sell ads. They're very good at this. So this is also another way for them to make that ad business even better and more lucrative for them.

Ryan Knudsen (8:19)

I mean, Google search is a massive business, and this is almost a way that meta can steal some of that business, essentially by giving people a place where they can ask questions, and then meta can mine that for data it can use to deliver more ads to you.

Megan Bobrowski (8:32)

Exactly. It's sort of twofold. Yes.

Ryan Knudsen (8:34)

The ultimate futuristic AI product that Meta is working towards is AI agents. These agents would be able to act as personal assistants or more.

Megan Bobrowski (8:46)

So what Mark Zuckerberg has said is he wants everyone to have their own personal superintelligence. He thinks people, as I reported last year, he thinks people have the capacity to have more friends than they do and that AI can solve some of these problems.

Sociologist/Expert (9:02)

The average American, I think, has. I think it's fewer than three friends. Three people they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or something.

Megan Bobrowski (9:16)

And also you can get an AI AI to go out and, like, do things for you and just help you in your life.

Sociologist/Expert (9:23)

I think as the personalization loop kicks in and the AI just starts to get to know you better and better, I think that will just be really compelling.

Ryan Knudsen (9:36)

Employees at Meta already have access to one such agent called myclaw.

Megan Bobrowski (9:42)

Myclaw has access to, like, a bunch of your different things, right? Like, it might have access to, like, all your gchats, all your, like, work projects, like your whole drive, all your emails. And so it doesn't need the context that you would have to tell a chatbot to do. Right? It can just go and, like, it has access to everything. So it can actually be more proactive. It can say, hey, Ryan, I see you have like a dinner with your wife in the calendar for 6:00pm like, do you want me to order her some flowers ahead of that?

Ryan Knudsen (10:15)

Yeah, great idea.

Megan Bobrowski (10:16)

Or like, you know what I mean? Stuff like that where it can actually be more proactive.

Commentator/Analyst (10:20)

You have an interview in 30 minutes. Do you want me to research some bad puns?

Megan Bobrowski (10:23)

Exactly. So with the agents, I mean, you can still tell it to do things for you, but I think the idea with those in some situations is it's almost better than you at remembering everything because it has access to everything you've written down.

Commentator/Analyst (10:40)

And this is kind of like the Silicon Valley vision for, like, the movie her with Joaquin Phoenix, where he's just got, you know, this super smart companion that's like, hey, you've got an important email that you might want to know about. And it just talks to him and

Ryan Knudsen (10:54)

he talks to her.

Megan Bobrowski (10:55)

That's all.

Tech Industry Reporter (10:55)

You mind if I look through your hard drive?

Megan Bobrowski (10:57)

Um, okay.

Tech Industry Reporter (11:00)

Okay, let's start with your emails. You have several thousand emails regarding LA Weekly, but it looks like you haven't worked there in many years.

Megan Bobrowski (11:06)

Oh, yeah, I think I was just saving those. Yeah. Like a chatbot. It's like you have to go to it and you have to converse with it. It can reach out to you, it can text you first. But, like, it's different. Like, an agent, I think, takes things like just one step further.

Ryan Knudsen (11:22)

Do you know how Mark Zuckerberg is using that CEO agent that he's been working on?

Megan Bobrowski (11:27)

It's still early. I think the agent is helping him retrieve information faster. So before, he might have to go through multiple layers of people to find information. Now he can just ask his agent to go find wherever it is and, you know, the emails or the drives or whatever and get the answer versus having to, you know, do that, like, telephone game of like, hey, can you go ask this person this? Yeah, let me go ask this person this. Et cetera, et cetera. That takes time. So it's still early days, but that's one of the initial things that we know that he's using his agent for.

Ryan Knudsen (12:03)

Coming up, how Meta's AI transformation is affecting the people who work there.

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Ryan Knudsen (13:46)

So can you walk me through how this giant pivot to AI at Meta is affecting the company's employees?

Megan Bobrowski (13:54)

Yeah, we'll back up a little bit more. So, Veta, just to get a sense of how this company has gotten to where it is. During the pandemic, it roughly doubled its workforce. It got up to like 87,000 people. And then Mark Zuckerberg declared year of efficiency, and they did a bunch of layoffs that got the headcount down to about 67,000. And since then, it's sort of continued to climb back up. It's now at around, prior to all these cuts, was around 78,000. And then last year, it comes out that employees are going to start to be graded on how much they use AI.

Ryan Knudsen (14:34)

And Meta's leadership expects employees to use AI a lot.

Megan Bobrowski (14:40)

What we've seen, there's a lot of internal memos that have kind of come out over the last few weeks, and one of them, the cto, Andrew Bosworth, says in the future, AI agents are actually primarily going to do the work and that the human's jobs will be to supervise them, direct them, and help them improve. So almost like everyone's going to be a manager and you have your own little agents going around doing things for you, but you're not doing the work anymore that me and you used to do.

Ryan Knudsen (15:16)

During an earnings call in January, Zuckerberg said AI was making it possible for a small number of employees to do a lot of work.

Sociologist/Expert (15:24)

We're starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.

Megan Bobrowski (15:30)

We sort of got a preview of how he was thinking about things, and then over the last few months, you've started to see it all go into action.

Ryan Knudsen (15:41)

Meta also believes it can rethink the company's org chart. In March, Megan reported on an internal memo that laid out how Meta was creating a new team focused on AI development. They would have a very flat organizational structure.

Megan Bobrowski (15:54)

It would be 50 employees reporting to one manager, for instance. So, like, really getting rid of the

Commentator/Analyst (16:00)

middle layers of management, basically empowering employees.

Megan Bobrowski (16:04)

Exactly. And so, and, you know, at this point, Meta is a huge, huge company. I mean, it was 20 years ago, it was a small startup. It's now grown into this, like, juggernaut. And, you know, part of what, like Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, the CTO talk about is they've sort of come to the conclusion that to get them to work more efficiently, you just need

Commentator/Analyst (16:23)

fewer people inside the company.

Ryan Knudsen (16:26)

Employees say the mandate to use more AI is creating chaos.

Megan Bobrowski (16:30)

People I talk to would say, like, there's just people creating duplicate tools. There's people posting all the time. It's like the wild west again, right? It's like the move fast and break things era again. People are being given, like, free rein to do this. Right. Like the company is saying, like, go out and try and just, like, innovate. See what you can figure out about AI and how to use it.

Commentator/Analyst (16:49)

So how did Meta get the idea, though, in its head, that its employees could be used to train its AI models?

Megan Bobrowski (16:57)

They've actually explained a lot of their thinking in memos that they sent to staff. So let me pull up. I just want to read from you because it's actually pretty interesting. They said we're on a really strong trajectory with our models, and one of the ways we can accelerate our path is by tapping into our own work day to day. While AI models excel at research and technical skills like coding, they still lack some of the basic ways that humans use computers, like choosing from dropdowns and keyboard shortcuts. For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples. This is where all the Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work.

Commentator/Analyst (17:44)

I'm a little bit surprised, actually, that Meta thinks that AI agents are going to be, like, choosing from dropdown menus and like, clicking buttons, kind of. Because when I imagine how an AI is going to operate, I feel like, why does it need to interact with a computer the way a human does?

Ryan Knudsen (17:58)

It's already a computer.

Megan Bobrowski (17:59)

Well, the Internet is optimized for humans. The Internet is not optimized for other chatbots to use. Right. And so at a certain point, this is what people talk about. At a certain point, the Internet might not be for us anymore. Right. The Internet might be a place where agents go to talk to other AI agents. Right now, the Internet is a place for humans, and so it's sort of built for us. And so there's a lot of cases where the AI has to act like a human to get to what it needs, because it's not built for the AI.

Ryan Knudsen (18:34)

Some employees don't seem to like all these changes. Megan looked at data from a website called Blind, where people who work at tech companies can post anonymously about their employers.

Megan Bobrowski (18:44)

In 2024, roughly 20% of the posts about Meta were negative. This year, more than 80% of the posts about Meta are negative.

Commentator/Analyst (18:55)

Hmm. Because they're being asked to train their digital replacements, essentially.

Megan Bobrowski (19:01)

That is exactly how someone put it to me was, am I automating away my own job?

Ryan Knudsen (19:07)

A Meta spokesperson said, quote, if we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them. The spokesperson also said that there are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content and that the data is not used for any other purpose.

Commentator/Analyst (19:27)

What's at stake for meta through all this.

Megan Bobrowski (19:31)

Meta is an ads business. At the end of the day, it's a very successful ads business. What this is all about is who's gonna be the leader in this space in five or 10 years? Like, we're playing the long game here. If Meta gets their way, they're gonna revolutionize the Internet again. Think what they did the first time around with Facebook, what they tried to do the second time around with the Metaverse. It didn't work. This is sort of like their attempt to do the Metaverse thing again, but in a way that they think is gonna be more successful now. And if they're right, then you're going to have everyone using their chatbots and they're going to be making a lot more money.

Commentator/Analyst (20:19)

And if they're wrong, then it's maybe just another oopsie daisy and the ads business continues printing money.

Megan Bobrowski (20:29)

Yeah. I mean, look at the Metaverse, right? It didn't happen. And that's $70 billion down the drain. But they're going to spend more on AI Now.

Ryan Knudsen (20:39)

Do you think they'll change their name again like they did when they were going all in on the Metaverse?

Megan Bobrowski (20:43)

What would you name it? Like, what would you change it to?

Commentator/Analyst (20:47)

I don't know, man. I should have thought of this before the interview started. I could have thought of something funny.

Megan Bobrowski (20:52)

Anyway, so, yeah, it's not existential for Meta by any means, but I think if they very badly want to be the next big thing and the thing that's, like, controlling so many parts of the tech ecosystem in the future, this is their attempt to do that.

Commentator/Analyst (21:10)

I thought of a name that they could use.

Megan Bobrowski (21:13)

Okay, let's hear it.

Commentator/Analyst (21:14)

Skynet.

Megan Bobrowski (21:16)

That means nothing to me.

Ryan Knudsen (21:31)

That's all for today. Tuesday, April 28th. The Journal is a co production of Spotify in the Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every Weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Have you not seen the Terminator, Megan?

Megan Bobrowski (21:51)

No.

Commentator/Analyst (21:52)

You haven't seen the Terminator? And you cover AI Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Megan Bobrowski (21:59)

No, sorry.

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