No marketing person exists today who can write a news release without a mention of AI. I keep expecting an AI-enabled terminal block. “Now, your electrician will never put the wrong wire in our terminal block thanks to AI…”
No CEO can announce corporate strategy without somehow incorporating AI—or their particular branding of AI—into the memo/speech/announcement.
Take Mark Zuckerberg, please. Faced with yet another existential crisis for his “we capture your attention for cash” machine, he proclaims “personal superintelligence”. Unfortunately, Zuck did not invent that term. As Om Malik points out in Meta’s Favorite Product Isn’t AI, It’s the Copy Button, he lifted the term and his memo from another source. Not unusual for the guy who lifted the idea for Facebook from his employers at the time at Harvard.
I went to two of my long-time favorite writers about Silicon Valley, Om Malik and MG Siegler for insight into the latest corporate AI salvo. As usual, there is more smoke and mirrors than real products.
As Malik writes:
Facebook’s real innovation has been in perfecting and scaling existing concepts rather than creating entirely new behaviors. Their strategy appears to be: watch others innovate, then copy and execute better with their massive user base and resources. Out in Silicon Valley, we call this “Zucking.” As I pointed out yesterday, the biggest challenge for Meta is not that it doesn’t have the resources or the mettle. It is just that it still doesn’t know what to copy. Scale.AI might help, but the reality is that no one, including OpenAI and Anthropic, knows the how and why of AI and human behaviors around it. Chatbots are a start.
Zuck has moved quickly to stamp out, copy, or acquire competitive threats:
Zuck has competitive anxiety. By repeatedly talking about being “distinct from others in the industry” he is tipping his hand. He is worried that Meta is being seen as a follower rather than leader. Young people are flocking to ChatGPT. Programmers are flocking to Claude Code.
Malik concludes:
Most CEOs defend their existing moats. Zuckerberg systematically abandons them. He understands that Facebook’s real asset isn’t the blue app. Instead, it is the graph of human attention and relationships. Each pivot is about preserving that graph while migrating it to new interfaces.
And over almost two decades of following the company, I have come to a conclusion that Zuck is one of the best “chief executives” to come out of Silicon Valley. And this is coming from someone who has no qualms about viewing him with moral disdain. In the past, I have referred to the company as “amoral” for a reason. Not only is Zuckerberg paranoid and Machiavellian, he is also willing to go to any extreme to survive and thrive.
MG Siegler writes:
At the same time, while you’re throwing tens of millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions – and perhaps even billions – at people to try to join your new Superintelligence Labs, a number of folks are turning you down. You’re making them an offer they cannot refuse and… they’re refusing it. Why? In part, perhaps, because your messaging around AI is muddled at best. Further, many simply aren’t inspired about the prospects of going to work for what is still very much an advertising-driven company trying to build the future of AI. So what do you do if you’re Zuck? Try to change the conversation.
When you read reports of CEOs who have read a news item in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal and proclaim they’ll save all labor costs by using AI, understand that they really don’t have a clue. Part of the comments are directed at investors. Part to scare employees. Part to sound like they know the latest technology.
