Mark Zuckerberg Is Reportedly Absolutely Furious at His Own Failure

Mark Zuckerberg, it can't be said enough, is firmly entrenched as the second-richest man in human history. Despite the luxury this unfathomable wealth affords — enough to provide everyone on earth clean drinking water and waste disposal, if he was so inclined — Zuckerberg still feels like he's riding the struggle bus.

Most recently, the tech tycoon has reportedly become intensely frustrated at Meta's failure to keep pace in the "AI race" with the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Though once set to rival the other America-developed large language models (LLMs), Meta's LlaMA hit the rocks earlier in May, after its latest "lightweight" models received a disappointing reception.

By the start of the year, Zuckerberg was reportedly already "agitated" that his rivals were enjoying more success, Meta employees told CNBC. With that air of resentment swirling around him, the CEO began micromanaging Meta's AI ventures, moving resources away from the Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research team — the company's more scholastic AI group — toward its GenAI team, working on commercial products like LLaMA.

Becoming frustrated with the lack of GenAI progress a few weeks later, Zuckerberg then decided to split the GenAI team into two working groups. That move was taken as a sign the CEO had grown aggravated with the team's previous leader, Ahmad Al-Dahle, who was demoted to co-head of the unit.

All of this came with a noticeable change in Zuckerberg's attitude, according to Bloomberg. Workers familiar with the tech baron say he's become incredibly picky and hard to please, going into what he calls "founder mode" — a headspace he often inhabits when he feels the crunch to churn a product out.

When this happens, Meta employees say they expect to work late nights and weekends, and field constant check-ins about the tiniest details. They also receive meticulous feedback from Zuckerberg himself, who often sets pie-in-the-sky goals that reflect whichever anxieties he's feeling on any given day.

And like his rival tech billionaire Elon Musk, Zuckerberg has a penchant for losing interest in previous tasks.

"When he moves to a new big thing, plenty of the most loyal workers jump with him," Bloomberg's profile of the CEO notes. "Often when there’s still plenty of work to be done, he’s on to the next big thing."

How long Zuckerberg remains in rage-fueled founder mode this time is anyone's guess.

His latest venture involves building out a 50-man "superintelligence unit," presumably a move to catapult Meta's LLMs back into the lead. He kicked that program off with a massive investment in the incredibly shady Scale.ai, and is apparently hoping to build an AI brain more capable than a human's. Whether he can keep his attention on that pipe dream as other priorities pop up, though, remains to be seen.

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