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mrweaseltoday at 1:50 PM11 repliesview on HN

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what?

This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:

> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected

Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.

I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.


Replies

stephc_int13today at 2:01 PM

Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.

He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.

Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.

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this_usertoday at 2:32 PM

Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work.

Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.

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jjuliustoday at 2:08 PM

>I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former.

Why is this an either/or? Those aren't mutually exclusive.

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karmakurtisaanitoday at 2:52 PM

I think one reason Google has been so successful is that the original founders did what they knew best and built a great startup, then stepped down and left the company for people who know how to run a corporation. I imagine these are very different skill sets.

Hendriktotoday at 2:11 PM

> Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.

He saw that coming and slyly prevented it. He cannot be as dimwitted as you suggest.

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rapidaneurismtoday at 2:33 PM

If you view AI as a way to downsize and cut payroll expenses without admitting that you must cut payroll expenses because the business is not booming, it makes sense.

croestoday at 2:20 PM

Given his war on the whistleblower and what we learned about Meta and Zuckerberg from her he is evil too

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laweijfmvotoday at 2:08 PM

his biggest fear is not being the one to nail the next big thing. it happened with mobile, although that was basically irrelevant in hindsight. he thought it was metaverse, which failed, while in the meantime it was actually the new AI cycle, which he was late on / lost by the time llama 4 flopped.

i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the most successful websites/apps in history, for some reason. maybe he thinks people will like him if he does something else?

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groundzeros2015today at 2:08 PM

[flagged]

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