I think its a fallacy to believe people like Zuckerberg or any other stupidly rich person aren't extremely calculative about this. I am very sure they have surrounded themselves by top tier engineers making very informed decisions while their top tier marketing teams make very calculated decisions on how its expressed to the public. The public generally is NOT in favor of AI outside of tech circles so it makes sense to communicate critique of AI to the public.

Executives are salivating at the prospect of AI being able to execute their plans instead of real humans. It is not even about human payroll cost, you can just tell that many higher up executives just complain about how hard it is to steer the ship and get people to work on the right things.

Unfortunately they also don't realize just how much decision-making real people do lower down the org-chart. Critical decisions are often done by the leaf nodes, often without even discussing it internally with the leaf-node team. AI will likely not be very good at this kind of decision making or realize any decision needs to be made at all.

Are you really saying that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of "Meta", can't make a massive miscalculation?

I am saying that none of this is just an "oopsie", a miscalculation, maybe, but definitely not as unexpected as it seems.

At that level it becomes hard not to surround yourself with obsequious yes men who will instinctively agree with all your harebrained ideas about virtual reality or AI.

Mark Zuckerberg‘s and Meta’s incompetence should have been recognized after the metaverse debacle.

They were lucky with the ad empire he built and that‘s it.

The layoffs are irrelevant to the discourse. It's typically considered by management to be good, for mature companies, to periodically fire as many employees as they can sustain without visibly impacting operations, and then re-hire cheaper workers only where strictly necessary. This allows them to keep costs down, reduce risks of excessive worker entrenchment, and overcome the drawbacks of contingent hiring-sprees.

Excuses for these exercises will vary, AI is just the latest; but it's fundamentally just a labor-containment/efficiency-seeking strategy.

The thing AI has been the most useful at is showing without a doubt that the emperor does in fact not have any clothes.

It's exposed the incompetence, hubris and sheer out-of-touchness of the tech leadership caste, open for everyone to see.

They're not smarter than you, they don't have any great strategic insights. They're just rich kids that happened to be at the right place at the right time and now have a cadre of sycophants blowing smoke up their ass.