Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner

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.

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.

Its even more wild that is flagged.

> 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

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

>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?

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.

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.

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.

People in power bought the press.

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

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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

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

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.

Gimme a break

> 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.

>This is not normal.

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

Zuckerberg said it, not Trump

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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> 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.

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