Cydney’s tied up today, which means city reporter Eddie Kim is stepping in to upload the weekend’s tech discourse from his brain to your screen. This week: Survivor’s guilt, fleeing billionaires, and, God help us, a profile of an AI entertainer.
This is Manic Monday.
Doom and Meta gloom
Meta has officially laid off more than 3,000 Bay Area workers — a bloodbath that triggered all manner of rumination among AI evangelists and cynical coders alike over the weekend.
One revelation came from Gergely Orosz, an ex-Uber and Skype engineer with a popular Substack, who wrote today that Instagram’s Trust and Safety department has been “absolutely gutted.” “60 [percent] of the org gone — between layoffs and forced reassignments to data labeling,” he claimed.
The bad news: Per an anonymous Blind item, there may be more Meta layoff announcements for Bay Area workers in July.
The mood is bleak, to say the least. fintech founder George Pu’s viral post last week described a Meta worker who has survivor’s guilt for remaining while a “super humble and reliable” colleague was let go after months of operating on “less than 4 hours” of sleep. The lesson: Being a good employee isn’t enough, especially when a leader like Zuck can blow $80 billion on his Metaverse vanity project and make 8,000 workers around the world pay the price.
At least San Francisco didn’t get yachtmogged by Zuck, who chose layoff week to float into Seattle on his 400-foot monstrosity. Turns out, tech’s most milquetoast king can flex a little evil-billionaire flair. Pacific Northwest Orcas: You know what to do.
Anthropic gets ready for riches
Breaking news: Anthropic filed to go public today, which means the tech industry could see one of the biggest IPOs ever this fall. What does that mean in terms of real-world cash? Techies on Blind are rumbling about the possibility of a $10 trillion valuation by 2030, which would mean that top engineers could be making in the ballpark of $250 million annually. “Pretty crazy to think hundreds of people will become billionaires in just a few years,” the OP wrote. Great news for anyone who wears those Garry Tan-core “There Should Be More Billionaires” sweaters!
What will this ultimately mean for the Claudefather vs. OpenAI? Did they time all of this to Pope Leo’s encyclical on the dangers of AI? And how does it make sense for Anthropic to announce it “confidentially” submitted an SEC filing in an X post to 1.3 million followers? Stay tuned.
Why billionaires are fleeing
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman may have been onto something when he revealed in 2024 that he was mulling leaving America amid the chaos of a revenge-obsessed Trump administration. With Peter Thiel now reportedly spending more time in Argentina, tech observers are debating the impact of other billionaires fleeing America: a scary phenomenon for some, and a big ol’ shrug for others.
The hyper-rich have long loved the idea of a sovereign nation just for them — see Balaji Srinivasan’s witless effort to turn Solano County into a libertarian fantasy state — but Thiel’s departure signals an end to that approach. The instability in American democracy appears to be a factor, which is ironic given Thiel deserves a huge chunk of the blame.
More than anything, this is about diversifying his assets, finding new tax shelters, and cozying up to fellow fascist weirdos like Argentinian President Javier Milei, who is struggling with a crumbling economy, widespread corruption, and mass protests by the working class. Huh, kinda sounds like home!
Frankly, I’m glad to see Thiel bail: It just means I won’t have to stomach the idea of a transhumanist ghoul haunting San Francisco with Garry Tan fireside chats and brainrotted interpretations of Christianity.
Trump’s concert was a humiliation ritual
It was already bad enough that Donald Trump’s “Freedom 250” concert series, scheduled for June 25 to July 10, had the strangest lineup I’ve ever seen: Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, Poison frontman Bret Michaels, rapper Young MC, Morris Day and the Time, Martina McBride, C+C Music Factory, and the Commodores.
Now, the whole thing’s gone kaput, thanks to an exodus of a majority of acts, with the departed artists claiming that they were booked without any notion of the event’s Trumpian vibe. Young MC, for one, described the fiasco as a “bait-and-switch” to Rolling Stone and wrote on Instagram that the artists “were never told about any political involvement with the event.”
Trump has been resigned to just throwing a rally for himself on June 24, whining over the weekend that “nobody wants to hear” these “overpriced,” “boring” artists. (Given Trump’s penchant for bullshit, this probably means they were getting paid peanuts.)
If our Dear Leader has an ally in this whole thing, it’s Vanilla Ice, who emerged from the depths of I Love the ‘90s to drop a take: He doesn’t believe music is political, doesn’t vote, and told TMZ that “I’ll go play for Putin and I’ll play in Iran if you want. It don’t matter.” Radical transparency!
The profile nobody asked for
New hate-read incoming!
This time, it’s courtesy of the New York Times Magazine, which dropped a profile of AI-generated “model” and “actress” Tilly Norwood today.
“It was harder than you think to remember that Tilly is just a computer,” writes author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who then goes on to… describe how very inhuman, strange, and discomfiting the entire experience of talking to Tilly was.
The fact that Tilly’s inventor, Eline Van der Velden, has no idea why there’s so much backlash and swears that Tilly is a friend to humanity kind of proves the point. What, you don’t want to commune with a fake Influencer Girl Who Looks Vaguely Wasian and stars in music videos about how “AI isn’t the enemy, it’s the key”? You idiot. You absolute Luddite!
Credulously analyzing Tilly’s speech, as if human behavior is only about outputs, is an odd feature of the profile. But I did snort when Brodesser-Akner reacted to Tilly’s passive-aggressive comments: “She’s also kind of a bitch.”
The week ahead: Peter Thiel discovers the joys of yerba mate and gets even more neurotic from the caffeine
