Mark Zuckerberg may need to prove himself after spending $14 billion and laying off hundreds of employees on the ill-fated metaverse project, leading to massive employee layoffs and subsequent spending cuts of billions of dollars on content generated through artificial intelligence (AI). On Wednesday’s call with investors, he promised AI development a top priority at his new company just in time, as AI-generated content will soon begin flooding every corner of the Internet, needing to be sifted through by content-sifting robots so this year will certainly prove his mettle!
New hires will continue to be “relatively minimal compared to what we would have done historically,” according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Investors have rewarded Zuckerberg for initiating his “year of efficiency” in early 2023.
Meta revealed that its fourth-quarter sales increased by 25% to $40.1 billion, the quickest rate of growth since mid-2021. Operating margin more than doubled to 41%, and net income shot up a massive 201% to $14 billion. Throughout extended trading, the stock rose 15%.
Meta will continue its efforts at cutting costs across its company. According to one executive, they have already implemented what one refers to as their “weenies diet”, with layoffs totaling 21,000 people since November. Their fourth quarter earnings met and even exceeded expectations on Wednesday; furthermore, their forecast for current quarter is also more positive than anticipated.
But despite Twitter and Amazon’s positive results, many of its 9,000 or so employees remain uncertain whether their jobs are secure. Unfortunately, this trend is common across tech industries: many tech firms are cutting jobs with repeated cuts by multiple tech companies such as Twitter and Amazon themselves in one year alone.
Zuckerberg told investors in his call with Meta that they will “play to win” in the AI arms race against Alphabet and Microsoft. According to him, Meta has an advantage due to accessing vast amounts of data – more than what Google and Microsoft use when training their own AIs – than either can use for training theirs. According to Zuckerberg’s estimations, Meta is home to hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of videos available publicly – an amount greater than any commonly crawled set used by competitors.
He noted that Meta is currently developing massive compute infrastructure, such as stockpiling 350,000 Nvidia H100 chips – the cornerstones of AI data centers – enabling it to take the next steps towards artificial general intelligence, or AGI still-theoretical technology which may one day rival human intelligence.
Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook have long advocated keeping AGI research open source to prevent misuse like we saw with some earlier AI systems such as DeepMind’s. Yet to date, no indication has shown up of AGI becoming dangerously out-of-control – and Zuckerberg appears to be banking on this strategy with Meta.
Zuckerberg made sure to emphasize that his company will focus on AI that makes people feel closer together, which is in keeping with his billion-dollar social media empire which thrives by connecting people. Although not the most creative or exciting solution, keeping shareholders satisfied remains crucially important in Silicon Valley.
- Friday Intraday Trading Sees Nvidia’s stock Market Cap Momentarily Cross $2 Trillion
- Trump’s January 6 Civil Cases Proceed While Criminal Case Is Halted
- Trump Delivers Speech at the Columbia Black Conservative Federation Gala
- Trump Declares Strong Support for IVF Following Alabama Supreme Court Decision
- Schumer in Ukraine Declares US Backing During House Aid Standoff