Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is upping the ante in the AI business, triggering a bidding war for talent and he’s willing to poach from competitors.
Why?
Well, like most of us, Mark is in hot pursuit of Godlike super intelligence.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 4, 2025
Perfectly rational man in a perfectly rational society that has truly mastered rational resource allocation.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 4, 2025
Ed Zitron summed up Zuckerberg’s recent moves and his overall strategy:
Mark Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for Scale AI, an AI data company, as a means of hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang to run his “superintelligence” team, has been offering random OpenAI employees $100 million to join Meta, thought about buying both AI search company Perplexity and generative video company Runway and even tried to buy OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s pre-product “$32bn valuation” non-company Safe Superintelligence, settling instead on hiring its CEO Daniel Gross and buying his venture fund for some fucking reason.
When you put aside the big numbers, these are the actions of a desperate dimwit with a failing product trying to buy his way to making generative AI into a “superintelligence,” something that Meta’s own Chief AI scientist Yan LeCun says isn’t going to work.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, my previous subject in this King Idiots of AI mini-series squealed like a stuck pig:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 5, 2025
I really should quote a little from the NY Times piece I referenced above:
In April, Meta released two new versions of Llama, asserting that the models performed as well as or better than comparable ones from OpenAI and Google. To prove its claim, Meta cited its own testing benchmarks. On Instagram, Mr. Zuckerberg championed the releases in a video selfie.
But some independent researchers quickly deduced that Meta’s benchmarks were designed to make one of its models look more advanced than it was. They became incensed.
Mr. Zuckerberg later learned that his A.I. team had wanted the models to appear to perform well, even though they were not doing as well as hoped, people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Zuckerberg was not briefed on the customized tests and was upset, two people said.
His solution was to throw more bodies at the problem. Meta’s A.I. division swelled to more than 1,000 people this year, up from a few hundred two years earlier.
The rapid growth led to infighting and management squabbles. And with Mr. Zuckerberg’s round-the-clock, hard-charging management style — his attention on a project is often compared to the “Eye of Sauron” internally, a reference to the “Lord of the Rings” villain — some engineers burned out and left. Executives hunkered down to brainstorm next steps, including potentially ratcheting back investment in Llama.
In fairness to Meta, the NYT failed to mention that Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta, said that it’s “simply not true” that Meta trained its Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout models on “test sets.”
And if you can’t trust the fine folks at Meta, who can you trust?
But I don’t want to dismiss Zuckerberg too cavalierly.
I’m a serial sucker taking things at face value, investing based on business fundamentals and underlying product value, and betting on professional wrestling.
He’s a stone playa who read the true nature of this society at a very early age, from The Harvard Crimson, 2003:
The creator of the short-lived but popular Harvard version of the Am I Hot or Not? website said he will not have to leave school after being called before the Administrative Board yesterday afternoon.
Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy by creating the website, www.facemash.com, about two weeks ago.
The charges were based on a complaint from the computer services department over his unauthorized use of on-line facebook photographs, he said.
Zuckerberg said he will not be forced to withdraw or leave school for any amount of time, but declined to elaborate on whether the board took some lesser action.
…“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community,” Zuckerberg wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson earlier this month.
After taking it down, Zuckerberg decided that criticism of the site was too strong to re-post it.
“Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” he wrote at that point. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”
The site was created entirely by Zuckerberg over the last week in October, after a friend gave him the idea. The website used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the “hotter” person.
Students were ranked within the general Harvard community and individual Houses according to attractiveness.
Zuckerberg hacked into House websites to gather the photos, and then wrote the codes to compute rankings after every vote.
The programming and algorithms that made the site function were Zuckerberg’s primary interest in creating it, he said.
After creating the website, Zuckerberg forwarded the link to a few friends for advice.
But the link then was sent out on several campus group list-serves, and traffic skyrocketed.
In the course of one day, the number of visitors quadrupled—by 10 p.m., the site had been visited by 450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times.
The part I love about the story above is the way Zuckerberg is the only source quoted. Those Harvard educated journalists are allowed to be awful from the get.
She also didn’t report the blog post he put up the night he launched the site:
“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
By the time of his 2018 congressional testimony Zuck had gotten some press training:
Zuckerberg, 33, paused and smirked. “No, congressman. FaceMash was a prank website that I launched in college, in my dorm room, before I started Facebook,” he said.
“You put up two pictures of two women and decided which one was the better, more attractive of the two, is that right?” Long asked.
Zuckerberg responded, with an emphasis on his youth at the time: “That is an accurate description of the prank website that I made when I was a sophomore in college.”
Ok, so he’s always been ruthless, shrewd and openly anti-social but I’m not sure he’s really that smart.
Social media had been pioneered by MySpace, Friendster and several other companies long before Zuckerberg allegedly stole the idea for Facebook from classmates.
Facebook primarily rose to the top because of three factors:
- Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and ran it into the ground.
- Facebook was honed for and marketed to the young elite and in an oligarchy, the road to mass appeal starts at the top.
- Facebook forced users to confirm their identities rather than allowing them to hide behind online handles.
Since launching Facebook, his biggest wins have come from buying budding competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp more than from any internally created ideas.
Never forget, this is the same guy who spent $47 billion in five years on “the Metaverse.”
He clearly cannot tell a good idea from a bad one.
He’s explained his recent AI spending spree to investors (who have no ability to depose him) in April:
“The major theme right now, of course, is how AI is transforming everything we do.” At the same time, Meta upped its capital expenditures range for the year to between $64 billion and $72 billion from between $60 billion and $65 billion to reflect more data center investments in AI and potentially higher hardware costs.
What Zuckerberg didn’t say then is that he was about to start shelling out mounds of cash to revamp his AI organization.
“Mark Zuckerberg is in founder mode and he’s not going to be stopped,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in an interview on Friday with CNBC’s “Money Movers.” Luria has a buy rating on the stock, but said that to win in AI, Meta needs to be successful with the next round, with the dream team that they’re building.”
I had to include the hypersonic quote from D.A. that CNBC featured. I’m sure it made great TV.
It wouldn’t be American corporate media if it didn’t feature interchangeable hustlers competing to spout the most ridiculous nonsense in the most simplistic terms.
They’re all like a TV sportscaster talking to drunks at noon on a Sunday except with no contract and an urgent need to be invited back right away.
Also making me doubt Zuckerberg’s wisdom was his recent, much publicized decision to hire the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s CEO Dana White to be a board member for a reported seven figure stock and cash compensation package.
Although there was some logic behind that decision.
From The MMA Draw, a publication aimed at investors in the fight sports industry:
This well-planned and well-executed attention-getter kicked off Meta’s 2025 with a bang.
That’s right, Meta, a company with a $1.59 TRILLION market cap has brought America’s best-known fight promoter (and wife-beater) on their board of directors.
The collective “WTF?!?” spawned headlines and social media posts all over the Internet.
Based on this round-up of headlines from Google News, the mainstream media already has a theory and it has to do with a certain newly re-elected President celebrating a big anniversary on January 6th.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 4, 2025
It’s also, according to The MMA Draw, part of Zuckerberg personally rebranding himself for the Trump era:
Reason #2: Zuck Is Getting Based
2024 saw Mark Zuckerberg embark on what Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian called “a wider strategic overhaul of the tech mogul’s public image.” She also explained why Zuckerberg might be doing this:Meta is embroiled in an anti-monopoly lawsuit and is being sued by dozens of states alleging that Facebook and Instagram are exploiting children to boost profits. Far better, don’t you think, that we all talk about how handsome a bearded Zuck would be rather than dwell on Meta’s less attractive business practices?
Honestly, it’s been a pretty incredible rebranding campaign for Zuckerberg, scoring wins by showing off his wakeboarding, flag-waving, and beer-drinking mastery.
Anyone who remembers Zuckerberg’s pathetic attempt to launch himself as a potential political candidate in 2017 should be impressed by how dramatically he’s improved his PR game.
He’s even gotten favorable notice from the Twitter fashion guy.
Zuck’s (seemingly genuine) fondness for training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has been a big part of this rebranding and a great excuse to pal around with Dana White.
Zuckerberg been talking up his love for BJJ since at least this 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Mark Zuckerberg on what he loves about BJJ: (It’s) a thing that is both super engaging physically but also intellectually and where you can’t afford to focus on something else. I think (it’s) the perfect thing because if you stop paying attention for one second you’re gonna end up on the bottom. So I’ve just found that is just really important for me in terms of what I do. Being able to maintain my energy level, maintain my focus… then after an hour or two of working out or rolling or wrestling with friends, now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day.
Zuckerberg has also medaled in a BJJ tournament and at one point even had Dana White calling up the Roman Colosseum looking for the right venue to host a bout between himself and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Naturally with 2020’s Zuckerberg, even the cage fight was vaporware.
Caveat: The Market, aka the most effective price discovery system ever invented disagrees.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 5, 2025
The dual share structure grants him dictatorial powers at Meta, meaning the guy has Imprimatur to do pretty much what he wants, including torching $47bn on what amounted to little more than a personal obsession with the metaverse, memory-holing that episode, and then lining up hundreds of billions more in his continuing quest for a defining “second act” that will secure his place amongst the pantheon of great innovators (as opposed to being known as the guy who stole the idea for facebook from a friend and has since built his empire on strangling emerging competitors in the crib). He’s as desperate for this second act as Trump is for a Nobel Peace Price.
His strategy clearly rests on aggregating the critical inputs for AI supremacy ie data (expect Meta’s family of apps to be harvested for every last bit of training data, user privacy be damned), algorithms (Deepseek’s algorithmic breakthroughs shocked SV titans, including MZ, to their core, hence his poaching spree to build bench strength and an AI intellectual aristocracy within Meta to push forward the frontier of algorithmic discovery, which by the way, given Meta’s history, will likely mean just copying whatever the real frontier players are doing) and compute (data centre build out is the sport of kings and given his profligate pursuit of metaverse supremacy, the man can outspend an army of drunken sailors everyday and twice on Sunday). We sure do live in interesting times.
https://youtu.be/_v3KiaAjpY8?feature=shared
I would recommend this video in full as it does flesh out the whole notion of how one reinvents themselves (or as this video calls it – becoming a new guy) as part of the broadrler topic.
It does address Zuck in particular around 42:37.
Zuckerberg and the other techbros are looking several steps ahead, but they’re not great at watching their feet.
Hey we saw the movie version, Aaron Sorkin on top of every PMC trend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_social_network
It’s not exactly warm and friendly toward Zuck but does seem enamored of Larry Summers.
As for Zuckerberg’s trial and error business model that’s so very much a Silicon Valley thing is it not? Musk blows up a giant rocket and just shrugs.
break things
Contrast with Zuck against say, Bill Gates who quite famously took others ideas or seriously underpaid in hindsight, either is applicable. Good connections and voila, now IBM has a supplier in Microsoft for their software OS on this new idea called the PC…Mark just took the same steps but got to the wealthy billionaire level much quicker.
So much to add about my personal experience but I enjoy many of the films directed or helmed by Fincher. Even the occasional dud or a film he disavowed, Alien 3 being a key example.
Speaking of the Facebook/Zuck movie, it was recently rated as the 10th best movie of the 21st century by both fans and critics. I mean, I liked the movie OK, but 10th best of the (quarter) century? Not even close, and I don’t watch that many movies.
https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/best-movies-21st-century-new-york-times-films-111414429.html
I was listening to a podcast about AI and investing.
Regardless of what you think about it, it is getting lots of attention from investors that don’t want to be left out.
Meaning if you are not investing in it you look like a fool and they will take their money elsewhere.
Never mind what China keeps doing with low cost AI.
Whether he’s interested or not, he kinda has to go along with the narrative
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Loves To Throw Good Money After Bad
#NitPick:
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Loves To Throw Unearned, Magic Money Made Up Via Market Malfeasance After Bad
It’s all Unicorn Rainbow Poop, designed via finacial chicanery to become high powered money. All of it, inflated value made real via stock “money”. That’s why he can pelt it around like tennis balls at a summer carnival trying to win prizes. Ugh. It’s family-blogging tragic when you think about it from the perspective of the public good being laid waste to by the US uni-party.
And another “inception” subtext to all this is our collective sanitization of the term “billionaire”, and the notion of “a billion dollars”. And absolutely obscene amount of money that could fuel a thousand lifetimes, sadly made acceptable for one person to have in a single lifetime.
#GuillotineWatch
lost the last of 3 baby geese.
and i stepped on a wire or something in the flooded road(tetanus vaxxed)…so my feets are both wrinkled and one is sorta sore.
no other casualties.
i am alone with the animals on this place.
we’re all good.
23″. since thursday afternoon.
7-7-2025
so heres how it happened for me.
july 3rd, afternoon, check weather, as usual.
Looks like heavy rain and some flooding…so I decide, after evening chores…critters put up, etc…to sit out at the wilderness bar, drinking beer(started w a margarita(likker first!)) and rolled 4 little joints(lack of proper zigzags), and determined to watch the storm…as is my wont…..my fone is filled with vids of these often dramatic events…usually brief.
This event didnt turn out to be brief,lol.
When im out here, I have my laptop for music and for occupying myself with the web.
And also for weather.
First place I go when I get up(4am) is NWS and Wundermap, to see whats happening…and then I do this regularly, all day.
So I had all my weather shit in one window…so i’m watching the storms IRL, and on the near real time radar.
And a brief, relatively minor event, turned into a catastrophe….storms just sat there, dumping rain by the tankerfull…all over from here to kerrville.
(turns out I got the most rain from this event…24” on my place, since thursday afternoon…more than kerr cnty..but I dont live on a river, nor have canyons).
So I watched it rain…hard.
Threw a tarp over the laptop and retreated(quite drunk and high, mind you) to the spots that generally stay dry.
And it just kept on raining, superhard.
Im from houston, and ive spent a lot of time in a vw van all over the gulf coast, and ive never seen a monsoon, before, save in films.
Thats what this was like…bangladesh.
So im out here, 5 sheets to the wind(by now, im sipping tequila…because why the hell not?)
watching this incredible monsoon hammer down and I remember thinking, “ well, this aint what they predicted”.
So I watched and watched…and soon, I heard a sound that I know well…rushing water…like over a rapids at a river.
But way out here.
It was the road and my almost always dry gully…which is not connected(for 40 years) to any current drainage system in this watershed. I had a pond…but filled with rushing water, calf-high…and so did the road,,,,and it stayed that way for…well…well into the next day(saturday), and I couldnt get to the highway until sunday.
Im 20+ miles from the Llano river, maybe 12 from the San Saba.
We do flood, due to the hills…but rarely anything like this.
But we dont have canyons…and we have more silt…often deep, between the hills, instead of the limestone caliche that they have down there(about 50 miles as crow flies from me, to my southwest)
Its now monday evening, july 7th…and it only stopped raining about 4 hours ago.
Ive had some breaks…such to pick squash and zukes and a whole lotta green beans to can…and ive been to the highway, to look at the dirt road…torn up, but passable once the water ran off.
That was saturday midday, I think,lol.
Maybe sunday///it all runs together.
\ive had intervals where I could go out and do farmer things…but then it rains again.
I was out in the worst of it…thursday night, all day friday….half of that time drunk as a skunk,,,with a headlight, crocs and naked(why get yer clothes wet?) and checking on the critters….and just surveying what was going on.
I am currently alone on this place…mom’s been at galveston for a week now, with my brother and his brood.
This is NOT how I wanted to spend my vacation from her,lol.
I’ve got a leaky house…due to being bad at roofing,lol…so my house is wet and moldy.
Take a week of fans and dry weather to even begin.
But I aint in kerrville, or comfort, or any of a thousand little wide spots in the road(and real cities, too) who have had it much, much worse than I.
I feel for those folks…and recognise immediately many of the places in all the vids out there.
I have lived out here in the texas hill country for 30 and a half years, now.
I know this place, this area, this region.
In that time, ive seen catastrophic floods…more often than not, along the guadalupe.
But ive never seen anything as catastrophic as this.
Pray, or send $, or sacrifice a chicken or whatever.
A hurricane came to the middle of texas.
So glad to hear from you and that beyond some very annoying property damage, you came through OK! We missed your comments. It reminded me of childhood when a tooth came out and before the adult tooth erupted you keep noticing the gap. The mouth is functional but incomplete….. that’s probably a stupid analogy but just woke up.
Here in middle England we are supposedly about to enter phase 2 of our summer record breaking heatwave. This time round my dad has been a total star and I have portable A/C unit now fully set up with appropriate window covering for exhaust fan set up. Hardly very environmentally friendly but after attending a meetup group of locals and seeing where the mood of this country is taking us, I don’t feel very inclined to do my bit anymore for the next generation.
UK entering FAFO phase.
glad you are for the most part ok
Was hoping you and your’n were ok… and glad to hear it’s so…
Glad you survived, what a storm!
What a tale to tell…
Glad everything is jake~
Glad to hear that you made it though the storm OK. Lots of people were asking after you the past coupla days and were worried about you. Guess that you have a boat load of repairs and work to do now that the storm has abated. You wonder if this will be the last such storm that you will see or if there will be more such storms down the track.
#Amen
Does the silt retain water that soaks through it? Could this event lead to local groundwater recharge?
If so, that could be a future benefit from all this rain right where you are at. It could hold you over somewhat through the long drought to come sooner or later.
Has any thought been given ( should any thought be given) to deepening the pond so it can store more water between the occasional super-rains?
yes. the deep silt(sandy loam, its called) directly recharges the hickory sand aquifer beneath me.
this is why i modified the levies and such in both pastures to divert floods into them, where it can soak in(also feed the deep subsoil, that sits just above a layer of black/gray clay, around 6 foot down.(i dug cores by hand long ago…yes i am a glutton for punishment, as well as a nut for such info)
the native prairie grasses(and things like wilman love i planted long ago to stabilise the then sand) have deep, deep roots that…along with the tree roots…poke through that clay strata and allow water to percolate down.
down around Kerrville, Fredricksburg, Comfort, etc(all along the Balcones Fault), they have caliche…a limestone and clay sort of dirt…that becomes concrete when theres a drought….that was the situation on july 3rd.
that sort of formation is called Karst…and recharge occurs through caves and fractures created over long term by the rain being just acidic enough to eat through the limestone bedrock. so totally different than here.
my area is older,as far as the long ago Llano Uplift is concerned….the Karst we have remaining is up on the hill tops, and has to a great extent worn away, leaving the old granite plutons…like Katemcy Rocks, or Enchanted Rock. Theres one of those under every limestone hill you find in the entire Llano Uplift.
and the limestone on our hills is old and brittle…unsuited for building, etc.
here, between the hills, are deep valleys, filled with silt/sandy loam…on my place, the granite bedrock is around 100-120′ deep.
thats where our wells tap in.
my neighbor, not 400 yards thataway, has granite not 20′ deep, and has to do rainwater.
i ended up with just over 23″, as of this time yesterday. and a large part of that water that flowed on my place, stayed here(pastures are still covered in 4″ of water), and went down.
this is why swales and contour plowing are such a big deal, allows the rain to hang around and soak in, leaving yer topsoil in place, rather than carrying it off to the Gulf.
biggest impact for me is my house…due to my poor roofing skills,lol.
ive been running fans and hauling out the remains of the mess the boys left me when they ran off into their lives, fixin to remove furniture(free and old), etc…and just GI the whole house, so i can spread pinesol on the whole floors, and finally paint them, sometime in august.
mold is what im racing against.
1200 sq ft house, so a big job…and i already had too much work and not enough body.
thank y’all for askin after me.
So glad you’re OK Amfortas… and also glad you’re so handy and will be able to recover.
Take good care.
Glad you’re OK. Stay safe!
Facebook’s ethical failures are not accidental; they are part of the business model
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8179701/