JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has had a tough few weeks. It lost two court cases about the safety of its products. It laid off hundreds of people and seems to be scaling back the Metaverse. NPR tech correspondent John Ruwitch is here to tell us more. Hey.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: All right, let's just get into it, John. Is Meta in a tough spot?
RUWITCH: Well, Juana, you've seen the headlines. Let's start with the lawsuits. They lost two big ones recently. In New Mexico, a jury found basically that Meta failed to protect young users from child predators. In Los Angeles, it was found liable for making a product that was addictive in ways that harmed a young person's health. So Meta's core platforms, Facebook and Instagram, were basically found to have serious safety and design failures. I spoke with Frances Haugen about this. She blew the whistle on the company in 2021 over platform safety and wrote a memoir about working at Facebook.
FRANCES HAUGEN: They explored a lot of different ways that they could have built their product. They weighed pros and cons on those different methods, and in the end, time and time again, they chose options that were more profitable over options that were more safe.
RUWITCH: And she said those court outcomes called that out.
SUMMERS: Tell us about some of the other challenges that you're seeing Meta face right now.
RUWITCH: Yeah, remember, five years ago when CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched the virtual reality Metaverse? He was pretty enthusiastic about how it could change the ways that people connect.
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MARK ZUCKERBERG: We'll be able to feel present. Like, we're right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are. We'll be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways.
RUWITCH: Yeah. I mean, he also changed the name of the company at that time from Facebook to Meta. They've spent something like 70- to $80 billion on the Metaverse, but Megan Duncan, an associate professor at Virginia Tech who studies social media, says it was one of Meta's biggest fails when it comes to hooking users.
MEGAN DUNCAN: The Metaverse itself was not capturing their imagination or being able to see a practical reason and practical use for it.
RUWITCH: And Duncan says there was another problem with Zuckerberg's focus on the Metaverse.
DUNCAN: He went all-in on it, and he missed the boat on AI.
SUMMERS: Where is Meta on AI?
RUWITCH: Yeah. When you think of AI, you don't really think of Meta. You think maybe of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. But it's not for lack of trying. You know, the company has been investing heavily in AI data centers and talent. It spent more than $70 billion last year on AI and expects to nearly double that this year. They've deployed AI pretty successfully to power their feeds and ad networks, that sort of money engine. But Arnal Dayaratna, a research vice president at the tech consultancy IDC, says time may not be on Meta's side.
ARNAL DAYARATNA: I don't think that Meta is going to be able to build a best-in-class generalist model.
RUWITCH: A generalist model, so something like a chatbot that can compete with ChatGPT or Claude - he thinks Meta may just be too far behind and the competition too stiff.
SUMMERS: Interesting. So what's ahead for Meta?
RUWITCH: Well, remember, this is the company that revolutionized social media, right? Zuckerberg seems to be trying pretty hard to get the company's mojo back. The company is offering these gargantuan pay incentives to top executives if they can do innovative things. Basically, they drive up the stock price. They've laid off some employees, although the company says overall staffing numbers are up. In an email to NPR, they say that they are appealing those recent court verdicts. They note that they do have parental supervision tools and teen accounts meant to provide safeguards.
And when I reached out to them, they pushed back against criticism that they're not on the ball with AI. They say they are on a rapid trajectory for improving their AI models with more to come. They have sold millions of their AI-enabled glasses, for instance. And as for the Metaverse, they say they're still committed to trying to connect the digital and physical worlds.
SUMMERS: That is NPR's John Ruwitch. Thanks so much.
RUWITCH: You bet.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOLA YOUNG SONG, "CONCEITED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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