So Mark Zuckerberg is personally assembling a team to achieve "superintelligence"—machines capable of surpassing human capabilities. Because if there's one thing we've learned from the past decade, it's that the guy who brought us Cambridge Analytica, a $1.3 billion GDPR fine, and customer service so bad people sue in small claims court is exactly who we want wielding godlike AI power.
The audacity is breathtaking. While Meta hemorrhages billions on the metaverse nobody asked for, shutters products faster than a carnival game, and treats customer support like an optional luxury, Zuckerberg wants to take a crack at artificial general intelligence. It's like watching someone who can't parallel park volunteer to perform brain surgery.
The Track Record: A Greatest Hits of Corporate Dysfunction
Let's take a stroll down Meta's memory lane, shall we? In December 2022, Meta Platforms agreed to pay $725 million to settle a private class-action lawsuit related to the improper user data sharing with Cambridge Analytica and other third-party companies. That's just one highlight in Meta's privacy violation orchestra—a symphony that includes $1.3 BILLION for transmitting personal data from member countries overseas, which violates the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
But wait, there's more! In September 2024, Meta said it scraped all Australian adult users' public photos and posts on Facebook to train its AI without an opt-out option. And just last week, researchers found Meta's tricks and suggest a few ways to safeguard your digital privacy after discovering the company was "siphoning people's data through a digital back door for months."
The pattern is clear: Meta operates like a data vampire, sucking up information with the restraint of a kid in a candy store. Now this same company wants to build superintelligence? What could go wrong?
Meta's product failures read like a tech startup obituary page. Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business after failing to compete with basic collaboration tools. Meta will be shutting down Spark AR, its platform of third-party AR tools and content, effective January 14, 2025, leaving creators scrambling. Meta said today that it is planning to shut down the news tab on Facebook in the U.S. and Australia in April 2024.
The company's product cemetery includes Parse (shut down after a $78 million acquisition), Creative Labs (multiple apps discontinued), Facebook Gifts (complete flop), and countless other ventures that burned through millions before being quietly euthanized. Despite the shutdown, Facebook promised to develop and maintain apps like, Facebook Paper (a news reading app discontinued in 2016), and Instagram's subsequent spinoffs, such as Layout and Hyperlapse.
This is the innovation powerhouse we're supposed to trust with superintelligence? A company that can't keep a news tab running wants to build AI that surpasses human cognition. The math isn't mathing.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies Meta's operational incompetence like their customer service—or rather, the complete absence of it. As part of the company's two rounds of layoffs, equaling roughly 21,000 job cuts, Meta gutted wide swaths of its customer service operation, leaving influencers and businesses with nobody to contact about their accounts.
The horror stories are legion. Facebook and Instagram users are increasingly turning to small claims courts to regain access to their accounts or seek damages from Meta, amid frustrations with the company's customer support. Users describe "literally the worst customer service I've ever experienced" and "extreme insufficient help we received. Having a kid se his spendings 'robbed' by a massive corporation such as Meta since nobody did ever try to help, only auto messages or questions, and questions, and questions."
When your customer service is so abysmal that people resort to legal action for basic account access, maybe—just maybe—you shouldn't be trusted with technology that could reshape civilization.
Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess privacy and societal risks, because nothing says "responsible AI development" like automating the very oversight meant to prevent AI catastrophes. Up to 90% of all risk assessments will soon be automated. In practice, this means things like critical updates to Meta's algorithms, new safety features and changes to how content is allowed to be shared across the company's platforms will be mostly approved by a system powered by artificial intelligence.
The irony is suffocating. A company that can't manually review its own products responsibly wants to automate safety reviews while simultaneously building superintelligence. It's like hiring a pyromaniac as fire chief while handing them a flamethrower.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: we keep letting billionaires out of their playpen to experiment with technologies that could fundamentally alter human existence. Zuckerberg's personal frustration with Llama 4's progress has prompted him to hire about 50 people and shift his headquarters layout to put the new AI team near his office. This isn't strategic corporate planning—it's a rich guy's pet project with civilization-level stakes.
The same pattern repeats across Silicon Valley: billionaires with God complexes and track records of corporate dysfunction decide they're qualified to build humanity's next evolutionary step. We've seen this movie before, and it doesn't end well.
The question isn't whether Meta can build superintelligence—it's whether we should allow them to try. A company that has faced a number of privacy concerns. These stem partly from the company's revenue model that involves selling information collected about its users for many things including advertisement targeting shouldn't be trusted with AI systems that could surpass human intelligence.
Meta's superintelligence project isn't innovation—it's corporate hubris wrapped in technological optimism. While Zuckerberg assembles his dream team in Menlo Park, the rest of us are left wondering why we're giving the keys to the AI kingdom to someone who can't even manage basic customer service.
The future of artificial intelligence is too important to be left to companies that treat users like data extraction opportunities and customer service like an inconvenient expense. Until Meta can demonstrate basic competence in privacy protection, product management, and customer care, maybe we should pump the brakes on their superintelligence ambitions.
After all, if you can't handle human intelligence responsibly, why should we trust you with artificial superintelligence?
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