What’s next for Meta in the wake of trial losses and layoffs? : NPR
A Facebook employee takes a photo in front of the new Meta Platforms Inc. sign outside the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021.
Tony Avelar/AP
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Tony Avelar/AP
Meta has had a difficult few weeks.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has lost two crucial court cases, laid off hundreds of people and taken steps that appear to amount to a U-turn on the Metaverse, a virtual reality project that CEO Mark Zuckerberg once heralded as the future.
Analysts say Meta’s rocky pivot into artificial intelligence, underscored by tens of billions of dollars in investment, has been mixed, and while the hope is to compete with the industry’s major players — like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google — it’s getting more difficult by the day.
On a legal level, a New Mexico The jury found that Meta had failed to protect young users from child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
And late last month, she was found responsible by a jury in Los Angeles for the depression and anxiety of a woman who used social media as a child. Google, owner of YouTube, was also found responsible.
Frances Haugen, who blew the whistle on the company in 2021 over platform security and wrote a memoir about her work at Facebook, says the verdicts validated concerns she had raised earlier.
“They explored many different ways to create their product. They weighed the pros and cons of these different methods,” she said. “And ultimately, time and time again, they chose the more cost-effective options over the safer options.”
Meta said it disagreed with the court’s findings and would appeal, as would Google. In an emailed statement to NPR, a Meta spokesperson said that teen mental health is complex “and cannot be tied to a single app,” and noted that the company has safeguards in the form of parental controls and teen accounts.
But the verdicts undermine the defense that social media companies have used in the past, that the problem lies in the content – which they do not control – rather than the method of distribution. Experts say the trial results open the door to a flood of similar cases this will likely involve Meta and others for years.
The company also announced that it lay off some 700 peoplemany of them are part of Reality Labs, the division that manages the company’s Metaverse products.
When he launched his Metaverse concept in 2021, Zuckerberg changed the company’s name from Facebook to Meta, a way of emphasizing how central virtual reality was to his vision of the future. In a videohe described an online experience that would allow people “to feel present, like we’re there with people, no matter how far away we are. We’ll be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, and completely immersive ways.”
From now on, the company is “correct sizing” (i.e. reducing) its investment in Reality Labs, although Samantha Ryan, its vice president of content, wrote in the announcement: “We’re not going anywhere. We’re in this for the long haul. »
But the Metaverse has struggled to take off. “I consider it, yes, one of the biggest failures,” said Megan Duncan, an associate professor at Virginia Tech’s school of communication who studies social media. For users, she said, “the metaverse itself did not capture their imagination, nor were they able to see a practical reason and practical use for it.”
Zuckerberg’s focus on the Metaverse had another consequence, she said: “He threw himself into it. And he missed the boat on AI.”
Meta invested more than $70 billion in artificial intelligence last year and hopes to nearly double that amount this year. During a recent earnings conference call, Zuckerberg said the company was on a “rapid trajectory” and would “begin shipping new models and products” in the coming months.
And the company points to successes such as increased sales of its AI-enabled glasses.
But some critics say competing with the leaders in the field is becoming more difficult by the day in a field dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.
“I don’t think Meta will be able to build a top-notch general-purpose model, because from a resource perspective, both when it comes to GPUs [graphics processing units] and human talent, it’s just not going to be easy to do,” said Arnal Dayaratna, vice president of research at technology consultancy IDC.
He highlights the staggering sums that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Nvidia are investing in their own initiatives to reclaim GPUs that are crucial for AI data centers and to recruit top engineers.
“I think they’re too far behind,” he said of Meta. He says they might be more likely to choose a niche, like video or AI image creation, rather than trying to compete with general-purpose models like ChatGPT.
Steven Levy, editor at WIRED who wrote the book Facebook: the inside storysaid Meta’s AI efforts haven’t been a complete failure.
“They’ve actually done a great job using AI to power their feeds and their ad networks,” he said, ad networks that are crucial revenue drivers for the company. “So far, they haven’t really shown that they can build a formidable border model.”
But he points to Meta’s successful changes in the past – like when Facebook moved from a university-focused website to one accessible to everyone, or when the company successfully adapted to smartphones, or when it became “a broadcast network” providing users with a wide range of content rather than just a place to catch up with friends.
The company also mints silver. Last year, it reported revenue of more than $200 billion.
The company, led by founder Zuckerberg, is being put to the test – and seems to know it. Last week it was revealed massive salary incentives it will reward top executives if they can innovate in ways that push Meta’s stock price to skyrocketing targets. It is similar to stratospheric salary structure Tesla shareholders voted for CEO Elon Musk last year.
Dayaratna says it’s a good thing.
“I’m certainly happy to see it,” he said. “It means they’re still alive in a way, like they’re not giving up yet.”
