During a Q&A with employees earlier this week, one of Meta’s top executives gave an ominous warning.
After lamenting “a tremendous number of leaks” from inside the company, CTO Andrew Bosworth said that, while he didn’t want to “ruin the surprises,” the company was “making progress on catching people.”
Since Mark Zuckerberg’s comments at a recent all-hands meeting were published, Meta’s leaders have tried to clamp down on an agitated and tense cohort of workers. The power struggle isn’t over. It’s unclear how Meta is going to look on the other side.
“There’s a funny thing that’s happening with these leaks,” Bosworth said during his Q&A earlier this week (a recording of which I obtained). “When things leak, I think a lot of times people think, ‘Ah, okay, this is leaked, therefore it’ll put pressure on us to change things.’ The opposite is more likely.”
“This is a company that, from Mark’s inception, as far as I can tell, has always played the repeat game,” he said. “And if you create an environment where leaks cause people to make things change internally, then it creates more leaks. You create an incentive structure that’s wrong… I think that’s a thing that we should change. I think we probably will at some point but I don’t know when that’s going to be.”
Like any company with tens of thousands of employees, Meta is not a monolith. There are still true believers and those who also do their best to just tune out the drama. But there are also reasons for concern: Employees are on edge about Zuckerberg’s next round of “low-performer” layoffs that are arriving on Monday. And many are still reeling from his politically-charged changes to content moderation and DEI programs.
The disconnect between that group of concerned employees and upper management was on full display during Bosworth’s Q&A earlier this week. At one point, he responded to a question from a female employee on Zuckerberg’s widely-circulated comment to Joe Rogan about wanting more “masculine energy” in the workplace.
The employee asked Bosworth to respond to Zuckerberg saying that companies need “less feminine energy.” Zuckerberg never technically said that in the interview with Rogan, though one could easily interpret the “masculine energy” soundbite to mean that the CEO wants a more specific kind of energy at the expense of the other.
“This really bothered me because it’s evident from your question that you did not actually listen to the thing you are criticizing or asking questions about. And that is not acceptable. I don’t know why people think it’s an okay thing to take something laundered through a biased source construct and bring it here without even bothering to look at anything that is free and online.”
“He wants us to be a place that supports all people,” he continued. “He says that in the interview and then you come in here and you haven’t even bothered to listen to the thing. It’s like three minutes. It wouldn’t take you that long. So, you can tell from your question [that] you didn’t even read it. You didn’t even listen to it. You just read something online and got real mad about it. You’ve been mad about it for weeks, obviously. For weeks, you’ve been mad about it. It’s crazy.”
- DOGE inefficiency: As I first reported, the head of the White House division Elon Musk has technically taken over for DOGE resigned this week. Now, I’m told that the roughly 200 technologists in what was called the United States Digital Service have no effective leader and aren’t working with Musk’s small bandit of young coders. It’s not a very efficient setup considering these USDS folks were already working on modernizing the government’s technology across agencies.
- Layoff watch: Sources tell me there were quiet layoffs in multiple areas of Google this week, including ads and YouTube operations… Sonos laid off approximately 200 employees… Meta’s five-percent “low-performer” cuts hit on Monday.
- Other headlines: This week in DOGE… Google is done with DEI and also now okay having its AI used for weapons (and employees are strangely quiet)… Amazon is planning to announce its AI revamp of Alexa later this month… X told investors that it owns 10-percent of xAI and 2024 EBITDA was $1.25 billion on revenue of $2.7 billion… A Chinese ex-Google engineer was charged with espionage… An ex-Apple employee publicly apologized for leaking.
Some noteworthy job changes in the tech world:
- Ryan Cairns will become the leader of the Quest product line at Meta now that Mark Rabkin is leaving in March. Loredana Crisan and other leaders of Facebook Messenger are moving to the generative AI org now that Messenger is being folded into Tom Alison’s bigger Facebook org. And another sign of the times: Henry Rodgers, chief national correspondent for The Daily Caller, is joining the company’s policy team.
- OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving Anthropic after just six months to join ex-CTO Mira Murati’s new AI startup. I expect more OpenAI employees to announce that they’ve joined Murati in due time.
- Ajit Mohan, Snap’s head of Asia-Pacific, was promoted to chief business officer, overseeing all revenue teams globally.
- Robin Washington is the new chief operating and financial officer of Salesforce.
- Spencer Rascoff is the new CEO of Match Group.
- The most insane tech CEO convo I’ve seen in awhile: Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son chat in Tokyo.
- Evan Spiegel went on The Colin & Samir Show.
- Andrej Karpathy’s new video explains LLMs for dummies.
- Elad Gil on why companies are leaving Delaware.
- Better late than never: Mistral launched a mobile app for its chatbot.
- Updated AI safety frameworks from Google DeepMind and Meta.
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