Latest news with #Zuckerberg
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Mark Zuckerberg paired a $250,000 'grail' watch with his cool guy uniform
Mark Zuckerberg is showing off wrist candy from his pricey watch collection in his everyday looks. After years of dressing in humble hoodies, the billionaire has beefed up his wardrobe with a custom gold chain and a collection of luxury watch brands. Zuckerberg, who Forbes estimates is worth nearly $250 billion, recently paired a basic T-shirt with a limited-edition watch. An iteration of the same model sold at auction for $254,000 in April, Sotheby's said. Zuckerberg's F.P. Journe Chronomètre Bleu Byblos is one of 99 of that model made in 2014 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the watchmaker's boutique in Beirut. Watch industry veterans identified the timepiece after Zuckerberg wore it during an April 28 appearance on Theo Von's "This Past Weekend" podcast. "It's one of those pieces that quietly signals, 'I know what I'm wearing,' without shouting it," Eugene Tutunikov, CEO of SwissWatchExpo, told Business Insider. Zuckerberg has other F.P. Journe watches in his collection. For his keynote at Meta Connect 2024, he chose a watch that resembled one from the Souveraine collection. Sotheby's estimated that it could fetch up to $54,000 at auction. "F.P. Journe is one of the most respected independent watchmakers, celebrated for its superb finishing, innovation, and incredibly limited runs," Paul Altieri of Bob's Watches told BI. Despite the rarity and hefty price tag, the Chronomètre Bleu Byblos is a "simpler" time-only choice for the Meta CEO compared to the more complicated pieces he's been spotted in, Joshua Ganjei, CEO of European Watch Company, said. Zuck wasn't known for flashy fashion choices when he broke onto the tech scene as a college dropout. Over the years, his zip-up hoodie and blue sweater became a staple of his style. Last year, he was captured admiring a Richard Mille watch worn by the Reliance Industries heir Anant Ambani. "You know, I never really wanted to get a watch, but after seeing that, I was like, watches are cool," Zuckerberg is heard saying in a video of the interaction. Today, he's turned a corner to crank up his style. His custom gold chain — made in honor of his daughters — is paired with many of his outfits, and he's rarely seen without a pair of the Ray-Ban smart glasses powered by Meta AI. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, previously praised Zuckerberg's new steeze in June 2024. Mosseri said his boss spent a long time "not wasting any energy on deciding what to wear." Instead, Zuckerberg decided to wear "the same thing every day for a long time as a lot of tech execs have done." Zuck is entering a new fashion era in his own way, with a watch that's a "perfect fit" for him, Tutunikov said. "It's almost like the thinking man's grail: no flashy logos, no gimmicks, just insane craftsmanship and a bit of mystery," he said.
Al Arabiya
2 hours ago
- Business
- Al Arabiya
Meta seeks $29 billion from private capital firms for AI data centers: Report
Meta Platforms is seeking to raise $29 billion from private capital firms to build artificial intelligence data centers in the US, the Financial Times reported on Friday. The Facebook-parent has advanced discussions with private credit investors including Apollo Global Management, KKR , Brookfield , Carlyle and PIMCO, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta is looking to raise $3 billion in equity and $26 billion in debt, the report said, adding that the company is debating how to structure the debt raising and may also seek to raise more capital. Such a fundraising comes at a time when Meta has doubled down its commitment to artificial intelligence, including a $14.8 billion investment in startup Scale AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said in January the company would spend as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure, seeking to strengthen its position against competitors OpenAI and Google in the race to lead the AI technology landscape. Meta and Carlyle declined to comment, while Apollo Global, KKR, Brookfield and PIMCO did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment. Meta was working with its advisers at Morgan Stanley to arrange the financing, and it was considering ways that could make the debt more easily tradeable once it was issued, the FT report said. Major tech companies are investing heavily to secure the vast computing power needed to run AI models, fueling demand for specialized data centers that link thousands of chips into high-performance clusters. Microsoft has planned a capital expenditure of $80 billion in fiscal 2025, with most of it aimed at expanding data centers to ease capacity bottlenecks for AI services. Bloomberg News reported in February that Apollo Global Management is in talks to lead a roughly $35 billion financing package for Meta to help develop data centers in the United States.
Miami Herald
13 hours ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
In pursuit of Godlike technology, Mark Zuckerberg amps up the AI race
SAN FRANCISCO -- In April, Mark Zuckerberg's lofty plans for the future of artificial intelligence crashed into reality. Weeks earlier, the 41-year-old CEO of Meta had publicly boasted that his company's new AI model, which would power the latest chatbots and other cutting-edge experiments, would be a 'beast.' Internally, Zuckerberg told employees that he wanted it to rival the AI systems of competitors like OpenAI and be able to drive features such as voice-powered chatbots, people who spoke with him said. But at Meta's AI conference that month, the new AI model did not perform as well as those of rivals. Features like voice interactions were not ready. Many developers, who attended the event with high expectations, left underwhelmed. Zuckerberg knew Meta was falling behind in AI, people close to him said, which was unacceptable. He began strategizing in a WhatsApp group with top executives, including Chris Cox, Meta's head of product, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, about what to do. That kicked off a frenzy of activity that has reverberated across Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg demoted Meta's vice president in charge of generative AI. He then invested $14.3 billion in the startup Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its 28-year-old founder. Meta approached other startups, including the AI search engine Perplexity, about deals. And Zuckerberg and his colleagues have embarked on a hiring binge, including reaching out this month to more than 45 AI researchers at rival OpenAI alone. Some received formal offers, with at least one as high as $100 million, two people with knowledge of the matter said. At least four OpenAI researchers have accepted Meta's offers. In another extraordinary move, executives in Meta's AI division discussed 'de-investing' in its AI model, Llama, two people familiar with the discussions said. Llama is an 'open source' model, with its underlying technology publicly shared for others to build on. They discussed embracing AI models from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have 'closed' code bases. A Meta spokesperson said company officials 'remain fully committed to developing Llama and plan to have multiple additional releases this year alone.' Zuckerberg has ramped up his activity to keep Meta competitive in a wildly ambitious race that has erupted within the broader AI contest. He is chasing a hypothetically godlike technology called 'superintelligence,' which is AI that would be more powerful than the human brain. Only a few Silicon Valley companies -- OpenAI, Anthropic and Google -- are considered to have the know-how to develop this, and Zuckerberg wants to ensure that Meta is included, people close to him said. 'He is like a lot of CEOs at big tech companies who are telling themselves that AI is going to be the biggest thing they have seen in their lifetime, and if they don't figure out how to become a big player in it, they are going to be left behind,' said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. He added, 'It is worth anything to prevent that.' Leaders at other tech behemoths are also going to extremes to capture future innovation that they believe will be worth trillions of dollars. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have supersized their AI investments to keep up with one another. And the war for talent has exploded, vaulting AI specialists into the same compensation stratosphere as NBA stars. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, and his top AI lieutenant, Demis Hassabis, as well as the chief executives of Microsoft and OpenAI, Satya Nadella and Sam Altman, are personally involved in recruiting researchers, two people with knowledge of the approaches said. Some tech companies are offering multimillion-dollar packages to AI technologists over email without a single interview. 'The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible, and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,' Meta's Bosworth said in a CNBC interview last week. He said Altman had made counteroffers to some of the people Meta had tried to hire. OpenAI and Google declined to comment. Some details of Meta's efforts were previously reported by Bloomberg and The Information. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.) For years, Meta appeared to keep pace in the AI race. More than a decade ago, Zuckerberg hired Yann LeCun, who is considered a pioneer of modern AI. LeCun co-founded FAIR -- or Fundamental AI Research -- which became Meta's artificial intelligence research arm. After OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, Meta responded the next year by creating a generative AI team under one of its executives, Ahmad Al-Dahle, to spread the technology throughout the company's products. Meta also open-sourced its AI models, sharing the underlying computer code with others to entrench its technology and spread AI development. But as OpenAI and Google built AI chatbots that could listen, look and talk, and rolled out AI systems designed to 'reason,' Meta struggled to do the same. One reason was that the company had less experience with a technique called 'reinforcement learning,' which others were using to build AI. Late last year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek released AI models that were built upon Llama but were more advanced and required fewer resources to create. Meta's open-source strategy, once seen as a competitive advantage, appeared to have let others get a leg up on it. Zuckerberg knew he needed to act. Around that time, outside AI researchers began receiving emails from him, asking if they would be interested in joining Meta, two people familiar with the outreach said. In April, Meta released two new versions of Llama, asserting that the models performed as well as or better than comparable ones from OpenAI and Google. To prove its claim, Meta cited its own testing benchmarks. On Instagram, Zuckerberg championed the releases in a video selfie. But some independent researchers quickly deduced that Meta's benchmarks were designed to make one of its models look more advanced than it was. They became incensed. Zuckerberg later learned that his AI team had wanted the models to appear to perform well, even though they were not doing as well as hoped, people with knowledge of the matter said. Zuckerberg was not briefed on the customized tests and was upset, two people said. His solution was to throw more bodies at the problem. Meta's AI division swelled to more than 1,000 people this year, up from a few hundred two years earlier. The rapid growth led to infighting and management squabbles. And with Zuckerberg's round-the-clock, hard-charging management style -- his attention on a project is often compared to the 'Eye of Sauron' internally, a reference to the 'Lord of the Rings' villain -- some engineers burned out and left. Executives hunkered down to brainstorm next steps, including potentially ratcheting back investment in Llama. In May, Zuckerberg sidelined Al-Dahle and ramped up recruitment of top AI researchers to lead a superintelligence lab. Armed with his checkbook, Zuckerberg sent more emails and text messages to prospective candidates, asking them to meet at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Zuckerberg often takes recruitment meetings in an enclosed glass conference room, informally known as 'the aquarium.' The outreach included talking to Perplexity about an acquisition, two people familiar with the talks said. No deal has materialized. Zuckerberg also spoke with Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and a renowned AI researcher, about potentially joining Meta, two people familiar with the approach said. Sutskever, who runs the startup Safe Superintelligence, declined the overture. He did not respond to a request for comment. But Zuckerberg won over Wang of Scale, which works with data to train AI systems. They had met through friends and are also connected through Elliot Schrage, a former Meta executive who is an investor in Scale and adviser to Wang. This month, Meta announced that it would take a minority stake in Scale and bring on Wang -- who is not known for having deep technical expertise but has many contacts in AI circles -- as well as several of his top executives to help run the superintelligence lab. Meta is now in talks with Safe Superintelligence's CEO, Daniel Gross, and his investment partner Nat Friedman to join, a person with knowledge of the talks said. They did not respond to requests for comment. Meta has its work cut out for it. Some AI researchers have said Zuckerberg has not clearly laid out his AI mission outside of trying to optimize digital advertising. Others said Meta was not the right place to build the next AI superpower. Whether or not Zuckerberg succeeds, insiders said the playing field for technological talent had permanently changed. 'In Silicon Valley, you hear a lot of talk about the 10x engineer,' said Amjad Masad, the CEO of the AI startup Replit, using a term for extremely productive developers. 'Think of some of these AI researchers as 1,000x engineers. If you can add one person who can change the trajectory of your entire company, it's worth it.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
Miami Herald
15 hours ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
Analyst reboots Facebook parent stock price target on AI investments
Afraid about losing your job to artificial intelligence? You're not alone. More than half of the people responding to a Pew Research Center survey said they were worried about the future impact of AI use in the workplace, and 32% think it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run. Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter Only 6% of workers queried in the survey of 5,273 employed U.S. adults said workplace AI use will lead to more job opportunities for them in the long run. About a third said it will lead to fewer opportunities for them, and 31% say it will not make much difference. It's not surprising that people are concerned about their careers. A McKinsey report projects that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, with 60% significantly altered by AI tools. Mark Zuckerberg has a different point of view. "I tend to think that for at least the foreseeable future, this is going to lead towards more demand for people doing work not less now," the chairman and CEO of Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) said in recent interview. Bloomberg/Getty Images "The common belief is that all the jobs are going to go away and actually that has not really been how the history of technology has worked," he added. "You can create things that take away 90% of the work and that leads you to want more people, not less." Meta has certainly been busying expanding its AI capabilities. More Tech Stocks: Amazon tries to make AI great again (or maybe for the first time)Veteran portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms moveGoogle plans major AI shift after Meta's surprising $14 billion move The social media giant is reportedly in talks to acquire voice AI platform PlayAI, according to Bloomberg, which could help Meta bring more voice features to its AI assistant and its smartglasses. PlayAI creates AI-powered voice features with the goal of being as "responsive as a conversation between two people," according to a company blog post Meta's artificial intelligence assistant has one billion monthly active users across the company's family of apps, Zuckerberg said at the company's May 28 annual shareholder meeting. He noted that the "focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment," In April, the company said it was launching a stand-alone artificial intelligence app and going head-to-head with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. And during Meta's first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said that "the major theme right now of course is how AI is transforming everything we do." "The first opportunity is improved advertising," he told analysts. "Our goal is to make it so that any business can basically tell us what objective they're trying to achieve -- like selling something or getting a new customer -- and how much they're willing to pay for each result, and then we just do the rest." Zuckerberg said businesses used to have to generate their own ad creative and define what audiences they wanted to reach, but "AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their product than many businesses are themselves, and that keeps improving." "And now AI is generating better creative options for many businesses as well. I think that this is really redefining what advertising is into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale," he said. Related: Veteran portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms move "And if we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today," The total number of ad impressions served across Meta's services increased 5% and the average price per ad increased 10%. Susan Li, Meta's Chief Financial Officer, said during the call that Meta has invested for many years and continues to invest in driving ad performance improvements, adding that "year-over-year conversion growth remains strong." "For us, we really believe, first and foremost, that advertising is a relative performance game," Li said. "That's especially important for us because the vast majority of our business is direct response advertising." Piper Sandler cited Meta's advertising efforts in a June 27 research note. The firm boosted its price target on the company to $808 from $650 and kept an overweight rating on the shares, according to The Fly. Meta's investments in AI are transforming its advertising technology, driving higher ad performance, conversion rates, and return on ad spend, Piper said. New tools like AI models GEM, Andromeda, and Lattice, which are responsible for selecting and recommending ads displayed on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, can drive revenue growth in the mid-teens for multiple years, the firm said. Piper Sandler, which says Meta is a new Top Large Cap Pick, adds that higher ad pricing is being driven by better conversion, and not lower engagement. Related: Fund-management veteran skips emotion in investment strategy The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
San Francisco Chronicle
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Mark Zuckerberg offered a spot in new UFC tournament
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already conquered the tech world. Now, he's been invited to compete in an Ultimate Fighting Championship tournament. The billionaire, who is a trained martial artist, has been invited by UFC President and CEO Dana White to put his skills to the test and fight in the newly launched UFC Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu division. The two influential figures have previously partnered to integrate Meta's virtual reality and artificial intelligence products to stream fights and reach a wider audience. White also joined Meta's Board of Directors earlier this year. 'We talk a lot about fighting, obviously,' White told TMZ Sports of his relationship with Zuckerberg on Monday, June 23, just ahead of the first-ever UFC BJJ event on Wednesday, June 25. 'If Mark keeps training and competing, he could literally come here and fight in UFC BJJ. 100%.' Not only is Zuckerberg a known UFC fan, having been spotted at several recent events, he has also trained with renowned fighters such as former UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski and former champion Max Holloway. He competed in his first BJJ tournament at Woodside High School in Silicon Valley two years ago, winning gold and silver medals. The UFC's BJJ promotion follows a 10-point scoring system, composed of three five-minute rounds. White also hinted at several other public figures potentially competing in UFC BJJ events in the future. 'Tom Hardy, Mario Lopez, and many, many other actors that are really good jiu-jitsu guys that nobody knows about,' he said, adding that by involving celebrities in the mix, he hopes to elevate BJJ the way he has with Mixed Martial Arts. 'If you know anything about jiu-jitsu, there's tons of tournaments that go on all over the world. There's big ones, there's real money involved,' he said. 'You can come fight the best at the UFC and win a world title. You'll be a world champion, everybody will be ranked, and put some structure to it.'
