Mark Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang a year ago to build a new AI model. The model does not work. Zuckerberg now spends his time explaining why spending infinite money on something that does not work is actually very smart.
Wang runs Scale AI, a company that labels data so machines can pretend to think. Zuckerberg looked at that resume and decided this was the guy to compete with OpenAI. The logic here is flawless if you ignore all available information about how logic works.
Meta's AI strategy cost tens of billions of dollars. The results are so underwhelming that Zuckerberg has to personally sell people on why they should care. When the CEO becomes the spokesperson for why his product might eventually not suck, you are watching a man try to talk his way out of a hole he dug with a platinum shovel.
Retail traders saw Meta's stock climb anyway because the market decided spending money equals doing something. This is the same reasoning that convinces people to buy lottery tickets as a retirement strategy. The difference is lottery tickets cost two dollars and do not require you to listen to Zuckerberg explain the transformative power of his latest expensive mistake.
Wang got paid to oversee this disaster. Zuckerberg got to pretend hiring one guy would solve the problem of being late to the most important technology shift in a decade. Both men will be fine. The engineers who have to build a competitive AI model while their CEO promises features that do not exist will spend the next year updating their LinkedIn profiles.
The real innovation here is convincing shareholders that lighting money on fire counts as R&D.
Photo by Julio Lopez on Unsplash
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