Zoë Schiffer: This is the confusing thing according to employees I have talked to because the tough thing about what’s happening right now is that Meta is actually experiencing record or near-record profits and revenue growth. The company is doing exceptionally well, but the company is not doing exceptionally well because of artificial intelligence. I talked to employees who are on Instagram and they say, “Look, our main competitor is TikTok. TikTok’s not an AI company.” In fact, you’re trying to index on this thing that’s really not at all why we’re printing money and now you’re laying a bunch of us off because of that thing when actually we’re doing our jobs quite well because again, the company’s printing money.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. And there seems to be, and I think our reporting has shown, a little bit of mission drift within the company. And you’ve seen that not just with AI. You’ve seen that, I think, for a long time when you see this $80 billion bet or whatever it was on the metaverse and then saying, “Oh, nevermind, here’s this new shiny thing.” AI is not another metaverse. AI, I think, has a better business case behind it. But at the same time, to your point, right now it’s not making money.

Zoë Schiffer: No. And I talked to two people who were personally recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to join the very fancy AI effort and both of them said, “Look, the vision was AI-generated slop for Instagram and the other Meta properties.” It just wasn’t uninspired. And meanwhile, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, not to say they’ve done it, but their mission is, “We’re going to completely change the economy and cure cancer.”

Leah Feiger: As opposed to make your grandmother’s feed the most destructive sign you can ever see. Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: So people were just not inspired.

Brian Barrett: And then even Meta has acknowledged that 10 percent-ish of its ad revenue comes from scams. They’re like, “Yes, we know there are scams. We know we make a lot of money off them.” And there’s a presumed like, “We’re on it,” but not enough probably.

Leah Feiger: We’re seeing layoffs or announcements of layoffs in a lot of places like Microsoft, Coinbase, Cisco announced it was laying off 4,000 employees. Is this the spring of layoffs? What are we looking at here?

Brian Barrett: Yeah, I think it’s the same conversation I think that is evolving a little bit where a lot of times it’s cover for having overhired. But increasingly, I think, Zoë, you’ve made this point, it actually is getting to be the point where AI can replace some engineers, or not entirely, but at least you can have a couple of engineers overseeing some agentic AI are more effective than 50 engineers.

Zoë Schiffer: I’ve talked to a ton of people about this and my opinion, which I’m open to evolving over time, is that if you have really talented high-level engineers, they can manage agents that will do the work of lower-level engineers. So what you’re losing now on is the entry-level jobs. And we’re seeing that in studies. So when we look at job loss and AI job replacement, what’s happening is that entry-level jobs are being replaced by artificial intelligence.