Changes Happening At Meta, Starting With Layoffs

There will be a lot of changes at Meta this year after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that there will be a sweeping layoffs of what he refers to as "low-performers" at his empire. According to a company-wide memo obtained by Bloomberg, this is estimated as abut five percent of its staff.

And interestingly, the move is already in conflict with what Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan about how the company was looking to replace "midlevel engineers" with AI. Whatever the exact configuration, one thing is clear, there will be layoffs.

"I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," he wrote in the message, adding that terminated employees would be provided with "generous severance."

Zuckerberg wrote that 2025 will be an "intense year" that will require the "strongest talent." But what exactly he means by that remains unclear as the billionaire makes sweeping changes to the company's operations.

The CEO appears to be taking yet another page out of the playbook of X-former-Twitter owner Elon Musk, who has long led his companies with an iron fist — demanding in 2022 that Twitter staff be "extremely hardcore" or risk immediate termination, for instance.

Zuckerberg already raised eyebrows this month by giving up the pretense of serious content moderation on his sites. Earlier this month, he introduced new measures that would allow hate speech and misinformation to proliferate unchecked on the company's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The straightforward reading is that it was a thinly veiled attempt by Zuckerberg to get in the good graces of president-elect Donald Trump, who has formed a tight relationship with Musk and will be sworn in this month.

How exactly Meta's latest efforts to weed out "low-performers" fits into the ongoing groveling remains to be seen. It's not just Meta, either; tech companies across the board are looking to tighten up their operations. Microsoft is also targeting underperforming employees as part of major headcount reductions across the company.

During his chat with Rogan last week, Zuckerberg also whined that companies were being "culturally neutered" by purportedly distancing themselves from "masculine energy."

Could his latest attempt to push out "low-performers" be symptomatic of his deranged desire to inject some machismo into Meta? Judging by the company's willingness to throw out the rulebook and double down on Musk-inspired meritocracy, anything seems possible.

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Coors' "Refershments": A Case of The Mondays

Typographical errors can happen to the best of us, but some fans were left wondering just how a major brand could make a mistake that made it all the way to billboards and national publications.

On 13 January 2025, Coors Light launched an advertisement for its beer that was supposed to read "Mountain Cold Refreshment," but actually said "Mountain Cold Refershment."

The advertisement was published on the company’s social media accounts, on billboards across the country, including in New York City’s Times Square, and as a full-page ad in publications like The New York Times.

One X user said they thought the "coors light ad agency getting the sack imminently, how does this even happen?? (full page ad in new york times)," while another joked that "They should have no regerts about a simple typo."

Over on Instagram, fans teased the company further, asking "What’s a refershment?" The brand took the teasing in stride, responding, "a refershment is when we forget to double check our post 😅."

Another fan said that they "personally love getting refershed ❤️," and a third chimed in to ask "Coors light u good bro!????"

Again, the account responded, saying that they were "Trying our best over here."

In a statement shared with Parade, Coors Light chalked the incident up to having "a Case of the Mondays."

The brand continued, stating, "This morning, we released a series of ads leading up to the Big Game intended to make the most refreshing beer in the world look even colder, and we’re aware that they didn’t have our signature chill."

They then addressed the fans who pointed out the mistake directly, writing, "Coors Light wants to thank everyone for letting us know about the errors. Very chill of you. Mondays, am I right?"

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TikTok Ban Will Benefit RedNote And Other Apps

With the TikTok U.S. ban likely just days away, the app’s users are pushing some previously little-known apps to the top of Apple and Google’s stores. The app that has so far seemed to benefit the most is a Chinese social media app called RedNote or Xiaohongshu, which translates to "little red book."

The TikTok-like app for shortform video is currently the number one app in Apple’s App Store and is in the 34th spot in Google’s Play Store. RedNote has been gaining popularity as many TikTok creators have begun posting about their experiences trying out the Chinese app. Meanwhile, over on RedNote, a number of creators have shared videos about welcoming "TikTok refugees" to the service.

The app is set up very much like TikTok, with the ability to vertically scroll through feeds of shortform videos based on your interests. Much of the app’s interface is in Chinese, so it can be a bit confusing to navigate, though there are some helpful videos on TikTok that explain how to change the app’s language to English.

While RedNote seems to have come out of nowhere, the app has been popular in China for years. CNBC reports that the more than decade-old app is seen as a challenger to ByteDance’s Douyin and e-commerce giant Alibaba, with about 300 million users.

RedNote isn’t the only app that’s been boosted by anxious TikTok users. Another ByteDance app, Lemon8, is also trending in both Apple and Google’s stores, where it’s in the second and first spot, respectively. But while TikTok itself has at times boosted the app, Lemon8 will likely face the same fate as TikTok should the Supreme Court side with the Biden Administration, which seems likely.

Another video app called Flip, which describes itself as "where social meets shopping," is also trending in both app stores. The app, from Los Angeles-based Humans, Inc., features shortform videos and an in-app storefront. It’s currently ranked number 14 in Google’s store and number four in Apple’s. The company was valued at more than US$ 1 billion last year, according to Crunchbase.

Another app that has seemingly benefited from the impending TikTok ban is something called ReelShort." While the app’s name sounds like a play on Instagram’s reels and YouTube Shorts — both of which are well established TikTok clones — the app seems to be less of a TikTok clone and more of a wannabe streaming platform. The app features bite-sized clips of longer "movies" with bizarre titles like "The Heiress Blacklisted her Husband" and "In Love with the Alpha." ReelShort is number seven in the App Store number two in Google Play.

While it’s unlikely any of these apps will remain popular for long, the fact that so many relatively unknown apps have risen to the top of the app stores so quickly is yet another sign of how influential TikTok’s users and creators can be. It also highlights how banning TikTok alone won’t curb the influence of Chinese tech companies in the US.

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Google Exec: New Approach To AI Could Lead To Superintelligence

One of Google's top product leaders expressed his support to a new approach to AI that offers a "straight shot" to artificial superintelligence. This also promises abilities far more advanced than humans in all areas.

Logan Kilpatrick, the product manager for Google's AI Studio, said on X last 30 December that he believed that aiming straight for artificial superintelligence, or ASI, without focusing on intermediate milestones was "looking more and more probable by the month."

He added that the success so far of scaling up test-time compute — the moment when an AI model must perform a task or answer a question — was a "good indication" that a direct path to ASI may be possible.

A lot of conversation has focused on when or how artificial general intelligence, in which a model matches or surpasses humans in a broad range of tasks, will be reached. Kilpatrick said that he still believes we'll get to AGI but that "it's likely going to just look a lot like a product release" rather than one explosive moment.

With increasing evidence that pretraining AI has plateaued, companies and researchers have explored new ways to improve AI models, such as by having them "think" through problems similarly to humans. Google and OpenAI have recently unveiled new models with improved reasoning abilities.

Kilpatrick suggested that Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and former chief scientist, may have seen "early signs" of the potential of scaling test-time compute.

Sutskever, who has argued that the industry is running out of data to train AI models with, left OpenAI this year to launch his own startup, Safe Superintelligence. Sutskever said on X that the startup would "pursue safe superintelligence in a straight shot, with one focus, one goal, and one product.'"

Kilpatrick said he used to believe Sutskever's method would be a mistake but now thinks it may just work.

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Zuckerberg: Pres. Biden's Staff "Screams" At Meta Staff

Mark Zuckerberg just revealed how the staff of outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden will behave if they don't like what was being posted in social media. He said that they would "scream" and "curse" at his executives at Meta over censoring Facebook’s users. This became more evident as Meta took on a more MAGA-friendly persona following incoming President Donald Trump’s win.

In a new episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" released last 10 January, the Facebook founder said the Biden administration became "the most extreme" about censoring certain posts "when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program."

"While they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true," Zuckerberg told Rogan.

Zuckerberg said the administration "basically pushed us and said anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like 'We're not gonna do that. We're clearly not gonna do that.'"

The Meta CEO recently announced that Facebook would be doing away with fact checkers on the platform, because "too much harmless content gets censored" and that "a program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor."

Zuckerberg told Rogan that specific events from the "last 10 years"—Trump's first election victory, Brexit, and COVID—led to "massive institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds."

He said he was "sympathetic" to keeping false information off of Facebook "at the beginning of COVID," but things changed.

"When it went from 'two weeks to flatten the curve,' in the beginning it was, 'There weren't enough masks,' 'masks aren’t that important,' to then it's 'Oh, no you have to wear a mask.' Everything was shifting around. It just became really difficult to kind of follow," he said.

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