Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner

https://www.pcmag.com/news/zuckerberg-caught-in-revealing-hot-mic-moment-during-white-house-dinner

by atombender • 11 months ago

167 87 11 months ago

This is wild. Meta, OpenAI, MSFT, Nvidia are collectively keeping the AI trade alive, which is propping up the stock market and overall perception of the economy. This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

aprilthird20215• 11 months ago

This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

Well, isn't that okay? All the companies are racing to capture a nascent market. It would make sense to spend beyond current demand and even projected 5Y demand if it gives you a larger share of a market that might last 20+ years

cmiles742• 11 months ago

IMHO, this indicates to me that these numbers are more like a marketing exercise.

leptons• 11 months ago

Zuck should have asked the AI what the spend number should be, I'm sure it would give him a correct answer.

gruez2• 11 months ago

This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

Because one executive got flustered and gave a random number to Trump, and therefore that's representative of the other 3 companies in the list?

lazide• 11 months ago

I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me as an industry insider.

Having a major exec flat out admit he’s just saying what he things the president wants to hear makes it seem night and day.

vineyardmike• 11 months ago

To be fair, when he suggested $600Bn in spend by 2028, it’s obvious they won’t actually be spending that. That would exceed their yearly revenue each year. They just don’t have that money. This feels like less of an indictment of AI spend, and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor.

For comparison, Google said $250b, Microsoft said $80b, but Apple has said $600bn. Meta currently spends ~$100bn.

gruez2• 11 months ago

and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor.

Even that's debatable because he walked back on the number shortly after

Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.

belter2• 11 months ago

Smart lawyers can make a lot of money here for suing shareholders.

mettamage• 11 months ago

But how does it keep that alive? Wouldn't it mean that the marginal utility of each dollar spend would go lower? They are already spending as much as they can and believe is needed since they are diehard AI bulls themselves. If they saw a need to spend 600 billion dollars themselves through 2028, they'd have already done it.

belter2• 11 months ago

Its even more wild that is flagged.

jaybrendansmith• 11 months ago

Agree. This article is completely on point for Hacker News. There seems to be a cabal of Maga-types (or AI) on these forums that reflexively flag any content that seems to smack of exposing the reality of the corrupted and anti-democratic times in which we live.

unethical_ban3• 11 months ago

This is not normal. This is not acceptable! Whether this behavior continues for 3.3 more years, or for eight, or more, our collective memory must stay strong: This administration is not normal.

jjulius3• 11 months ago

This is not normal.

It is, it's just that we can see it now.

decremental• 11 months ago

When my guy is in office it's good and normal. When their guy is in office it's bad.

quantummagic2• 11 months ago

This is not normal

Honest question, what about this hot-mic moment, isn't normal? There are lots of reasons to oppose the current administration, but this seems like the mildest revelation possible. The kind of interaction that could happen in almost any media circus event.

sebastian_z• 11 months ago

I do not find it normal for a private company to seek affirmation from a president that a certain amount of investment is in line with what the president thinks that amount should be.

unethical_ban3• 11 months ago

A demented authoritarian needing weekly multi-hour affirmations of his grandeur from his cabinet and the wealthiest corporate overlords on the planet.

Said overlords creating numbers from fantasy-land and selling it to the citizenry as some kind of plan or commitment.

It is mild compared to the other hundred things going on (like the Defense secretary saying women shouldn't have the right to vote), but I can only comment on the ones involving technology.

johnnienaked3• 11 months ago

Zuckerberg said it, not Trump

noarchy• 11 months ago

Zuckerberg knew he needed to come up with a wild number because of Trump's presence. This is what is becoming normalized.

maxlin• 11 months ago

Normal? Nope. Better than the previous, or what would have been put in place of it? Yes.

I don't think Americans would mind someone less radical who could bring the country together next time though. Or maybe everyone would mind, but not enough to feel like its the worst thing in the world. In a way the bar isn't high for anyone I think.

quantummagic2• 11 months ago

It sounds to me like he was just apologizing for pulling a number out of his butt. Not sure how revealing it is. Doesn't seem surprising that he wouldn't have such a projection on the tip of his tongue, unless expecting to announce it. And nobody should put much stock in such a projection, whether it was a considered number, or off-the-cuff.

djeastm• 11 months ago

Regardless of whether the estimate would be accurate or not, what legitimate reason could he have for saying "I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" to the President? Why would the President need to have input on what Meta's spend is going to be if not for some kind of prior arrangement? This all just leaves a terrible taste in one's mouth for someone who wants government and industry at arms length as much as possible.

bediger4000• 11 months ago

I agree. This makes the whole AI business cycle seem less like the vaunted free market working, and more like some kind of crony capitalism, or merchantilism, except that instead of representative government with voter accountability, Trump decides.

anal_reactor• 11 months ago

It's simple. Trump is in power, and everyone needs to show respect. This makes him even more popular in the eyes of average person, which reinforces his power, and Zuckerberg doesn't give a fuck that peasants think he's weak, as long as that makes him rich.

See how oligarchy works in Russia.

whazor• 11 months ago

Meta is doing very high investments into AI and who knows how successful that would be. His projection assume multiple big successes the next years and bigger follow up investments. Investors prefer a CEO who thinks in success.

duxup2• 11 months ago

It's revealing in that it sounds like they're there to deliver a script for Trump. How scripted these sessions are I think is interesting. It sounds like Mark was thinking he was supposed to say a number he was told to say, not anything relevant to what they're actually doing.

bethekidyouwant• 11 months ago

Well, there are certainly many ways to editorialize this. It seems clear that he was not told what to say and wanting to please the president sounds like a him problem. Also, I would read Facebook’s AI investments as a way to just prop up their own stock with some kind of promise that eventually their AI model will be good which right now it is not

andoando• 11 months ago

Jesus fuck were spending hundreds of billions in a few years on AI? Slow the fuck down. Lets establish some proof of value first

aprilthird20215• 11 months ago

Pretty sure most of the Mag 7 have on paper already north of $100B in AI infra spend this upcoming year.

jeswin• 11 months ago

Lets establish some proof of value first

Recently spoke to someone who said that most startups in their (very large) portfolio are using AI to write most of their code. I personally know this to be true in several startups I've seen; and I've seen slow but steady adoption in larger companies.

We can debate about spending hundreds of billions per year, but the value is beyond question at this point at least in software.

Eldt• 11 months ago

I find this hard to believe given the quality of code that AI models currently produce. Does the startup have a successful product? Or does it have a spaghetti ball of technical debt waiting to explode?

dustrider2• 11 months ago

Just to make the point. I agree there’s adoption but value is still being figured out.

See the MIT Nanda study, and the other one from a few weeks back on the perceived vs actual productivity increases.

There is value, but so far nowhere near as much as the people pushing AI would like you to believe has actually been delivered

apparent• 11 months ago

I think he was talking about domestic spend in general, which would include AI and everything else Meta does. Also, he probably just picked a number that would be in the proper order of magnitude, so that when it turns out to be incorrect, it is not wildly so.

cmiles742• 11 months ago

He repeated Tim Cook’s number, probably he was nervous and it was top-of-mind.

Draiken• 11 months ago

AI will win because mediocrity is enough to generate profits and all that's all we care about.

I hate it but I don't see how we can stop it.

johnnienaked3• 11 months ago

All throughout Arizona they are popping up directly next to substations--UPstream of communities. I wonder if in the near future we'll be getting electricity bills from Meta

JCM9• 11 months ago

It’s a sign of just how much the current AI hype cycle is a house of cards not backed by any logical business fundamentals.

int0x29• 11 months ago

Can't question the hype cycle. Of course the post is flagged

ncr100• 11 months ago

Not sure I'm asking this correctly: As an officer in a Public Company, does this behavior impugn him as CEO or the company in any legal way?

rwmj• 11 months ago

I think only if anyone believed him. Since no one does it has no material effect on the stock price.

skort2• 11 months ago

So if nobody believes him, why is he a highly compensated executive? Shouldn't he be relieved of all responsibilities? Even if he owns a majority of controlling shares, that should be a red flag that the guy in charge has no clue what he's doing. It's wild that we just treat this behavior as normal.

greekrich922• 11 months ago

Not sure if you've noticed, but laws aren't real for them anymore as long as they're at that table

tempodox• 11 months ago

True, not even limited to that table only, but disappointing uncle Donald could have consequences.

mrandish2• 11 months ago

I don't know about "impugn him" but there are SEC regulations and legal standards for when a public company CEO makes "forward looking statements", however the standards are looser when speaking casually vs in an earnings call or in regulatory filings.

Plus how much a company currently expects to spend toward a specific initiative isn't a number likely to cause shareholder litigation like revenue, earnings, margins or share price. You pretty much never hear a public company CEO put numbers on those outside of an earnings call.

elcapitan• 11 months ago

https://archive.ph/1gc2Z

asveikau• 11 months ago

I am no fan of Zuckerberg or Trump, but I didn't find this hot mic to be particularly shocking or outrageous.

I think the tech leaders' presence at the event in the first place is much more damning. There are worse clips that came out of that event, of statements made out in the open.

bezier-curve2• 11 months ago

This type of story kind of summarizes my feelings towards these mega rich people in general, it's not a coincidence they're spending most of their time self-preserving and building bunkers [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-co...

Edit: Fascinating seeing downvotes over an insightful comment simply calling out the self-absorbed nature of billionaires. Have fun with that, probably my last comment on HN. This place is a circle jerk for techbros with charasmatic professional moderators that algorithmically punish the very things their own guidelines support. Waste of sincere people's time.

bezier-curve2• 11 months ago

This comment was cited based on

Crankiness about billionaires and "circle jerks for tech bros" and all that just has nothing to do with the intellectual curiosity we're trying to foster on the site.

Sorry, but if we pretend suggesting billionaires not having most people's best interest is "crankiness", we are not running a very intellectually honest community. Convince me this is not a circle jerk when it takes 5 years of commenting to get 50% of the privilege to downvote. I'm out.

darepublic• 11 months ago

He forgot to put the tape over it

mrtksn• 11 months ago

I thought this is obvious by now? It's just a show, no one is actually investing such money - this is to spice up the casino and run a news cycle for Trump.

I mean, just check the numbers they are throwing around, there's no such money and Elon Musk even called it out previously in the context of his spat with OpenAI(how much was that $500B on the stargate project?).

Everything is like that, EU is supposed to invest $600B in US but EU's yearly budget is $200B. Qatar is investing $1.2T but their GDP is $200B. Japan to invest in us $550B but they too don't have such money laying around. Saudi's to invest $600B, that's half of their GDP.

This is just part of the show and people figured that Trump likes multiples of $600B, just I wish it wasn't so damaging.

claytongulick• 11 months ago

I think (hope?) that the best thing that will come from tye AI hype will be innovations in power creation and delivery.

If the unexpected side effect of building these giant stochastic parrots is that we usher in an age of decentralized, safe nuclear SMRs, it will have been well worth it, whether or not they are actual productivity boosters.

esseph• 11 months ago

I think the exact opposite of that is what is most likely to happen.

garbawarb• 11 months ago

"I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" doesn't sound to me necessarily like making a number up. There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment" and it sounds like this number he chose is just one particular way of measuring it.

conception• 11 months ago

Yeah that’s definitely what it was. Definitely. Lots of thought and research went into the number.

fabian2k• 11 months ago

In a different setting, with a different person on the other side that might potentially be plausible. But with Trump, why would you expect him to know or care about any details like that.

Stevvo• 11 months ago

Sure, but $600 Billion did sound very made up. Even without the hot-mic it would not be believable.

greekrich922• 11 months ago

Gimme a break

mrandish2• 11 months ago

There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment"

Indeed. Anyone familiar with public company financials and budgeting (like Wall Street analysts) know any number like this is only a broad estimate at best. For example, is that number counting the full value of capital expenditures (such as GPUs) immediately amortizing that cost over the asset's life? Most accounting methods would say capex should be depreciated over time but in many kinds of purchase transactions NVidia may book the full revenue in the quarter they deliver the card, so in that sense, the money is "in the economy" which may be more appropriate given the context.

And that's just a simple example. It gets much more complex and there are lots of judgement calls about how multi-use assets are booked and employee costs are apportioned across business units. It's likely no one at Meta even has a credible budget number for overall Meta-wide "AI spend over the next three years." If you ask the CFO to come up with a number, they're going to assign a team to make a best estimate under "given assumptions" - and then that team is going to ask you 20 or 30 questions about how you want to count. So... it's understood that numbers cited at a photo opp like this are SWAGs at best. Plus, even if finance penciled out an estimate, that estimate would certainly change substantially during the yearly budget cycle and change meaningfully quarter to quarter. So, such a snapshot in time is pretty worthless in terms of actual predictive value.

duxup2• 11 months ago

He was asking what the made up number was supposed to be.

skort2• 11 months ago

So much of what is going on with big tech and the US government at the moment is either wildly corrupt or completely bewildering.

And the response from most major press seems to be a simple shrug?

What happened to holding people in power accountable?

clipsy• 11 months ago

People in power bought the press.

nickdothutton• 11 months ago

People really shouldn’t read too much into these numbers, particularly in that kind of forum rather than an analyst call. Is M&A an investment? What about hiring a team with stock? Commitment or actually transacted? As cash, equity, debt? Other than the sheer orders of magnitude being bandied around, and that being an indicator of the kind of phase we’re in right now.

ChrisArchitect• 11 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142587

tolerance• 11 months ago

I hope the community continues to flag these kind of banal news stories.

frays• 11 months ago

He's still his awkward self. Amazing to see a software engineer make it to this level (unlike all the other CEOs who are managers)

southernplaces72• 11 months ago

Why the fuck is this flagged? It's completely relevant to this site, and very much worthy of debate. Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?

blooalien• 11 months ago

"Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?"

These days it's almost certainly just a small army of "AI" powered bots tasked with watching the site for topics to auto-flag or derail with inflammatory comments for their tinfoil-hat-wearing overlords.

southernplaces72• 11 months ago

Sure, maybe, but the site's human moderators and admins could also maybe dedicate just a modicum of extra effort to counteracting this nonsense seeing how evident and common it's become. HN doesn't have an enormous number of submissions that gain traction on its main page. It wouldn't be hard to keep an eye on idiotic flagging with fairly modest effort, if they gave a damn about doing it.

amai• 11 months ago

Zuckerberg does a Trump and just invents numbers.

vlan121• 11 months ago

I dont know about this. You can look up a video on YouTube but when you search for valid sources I just find magazines I never heard of. Is there a valid source?

alex1138• 11 months ago

[flagged]

Yeah pretty on par for HN

No actual discussion allowed if things get spicy for anyone connected to the VC industry

Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner

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