In June that year, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI to reboot its AI efforts for a whopping $14.8B, and brought in Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang to take over Meta’s AI strategy. [...] Based on the investment made into Scale AI and Wang, it’s pretty clear that Meta — and Zuckerberg — is determined to build a state-of-the-art LLM that can be competitive with the latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT. But Meta has to start pretty much from scratch, and it’s up to Alexandr Wang to deliver. [...] Zuckerberg has full control over the business, and has made the decisions to reallocate a good part of engineering folks to data labeling, to roll out tracking software, and to lay off 10% of staff when Meta achieved record revenue and profits. As the CEO, the buck clearly stops with him. But it’s hard to unsee that — outside of layoffs — everything that Meta is doing is taken from the Scale AI playbook, and that surely comes from Wang.

there is a shrinking and flattening that comes with being owned by people whose interests, on balance, are themselves notably small and flat. Every business these people touch winds up cheapened, worsened, and dispiritingly similar in its overall enfeeblement as a result. This, more than any heroic acts of innovation or creative destruction, is where the market is right now—driven to find just how diminished and demeaning a version of a once-useful service people are still willing to pay for.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

My basic assumption is that our life has increasingly split up into unrelated compartments, whose only form of order and interrelationship comes through fitting into the automatic organizations and mechanisms that in fact govern our daily existence. We have lost the essential capacity of self-governing persons—the freedom to make decisions, to say Yes or No in terms of our own purposes—so that, though we have vastly augmented our powers, through the high development of technics, we have not developed the capacity to control those powers in any proportionate degree. As a result, our very remedies are only further symptoms of the disease itself.