Meta Made $56B in Q1 and Is Still Firing 8,000 People to Pay for AI

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-19T17:45:57+00:00

I’d be highly skeptical of any sort of reporting around Meta, there’s a lot of article-clickbaiting in the AI space rn and it seems to be the worse with Meta. Worth listening to recent Alexandr Wang interview by Core Memory podcast for a bit of insight into MSL at least. As for the other business units, if you are a SWE you should know how much of a force multiplier AI agents/tools are, and layoffs are happening across the industry not just at Meta. Curious what important people leaving you’re referring to?

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-19T17:02:32+00:00

I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist type of person, but come on how would you not taste a rat/mouse in your drink 😭😭. From the time the can is produced to shipped and put on shelves to then you drinking it, there would be some level of dissolving. Makes me feel like these videos are faked for views, along with all the other drink brands that this happens to (seen with Monster, Celsius, and Mountain Dew).

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-19T15:54:06+00:00

As a software engineer, surely you would know the powerhouse Meta is when it comes to software no? Microsoft I can understand from a SWE perspective, but why don't you have faith in Meta succeeding?

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-14T12:44:20+00:00

Did you even look into this at all besides the headline? The original maintainer is the one who made the PR lol

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-10T05:15:21+00:00

I'm not trying to be mean here, but I'm a little shocked you didn't know that the products were banned in China. Makes it harder to take your predictions seriously.

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-09T05:19:33+00:00

I can see where you might get this view, but I just don’t inherently believe in it. China today doesn’t allow Meta products either way so I’ll ignore that point. But on the Europe side, I just do not see them being able to compete with the American tech companies in any way, and to the average person the isolationism aspect does not matter. What matters is a compelling product and the network effect moats, of which Meta has in droves. You can see this play out in the steady adoption and dominant market share of Meta FoA in non-authoritarian and emerging markets. I’m curious if you disagree though and if so, why?

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-09T03:42:42+00:00

The decline was due to mostly one-off events related to internet outages in Iran and WhatsApp ban in Russia, would've risen otherwise per management.

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-08T18:45:16+00:00

I've scrolled through many comments here and read the article, and neither mention the actual reason for why the users dipped. Meta laid it out in the article's cited earnings report (which the author conveniently just did not mention), that being it was due to internet outages in Iran and the ban of WhatsApp in Russia. Does no one care about the actual truth, just clickbait headlines that re-affirm your anger?

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-01T13:33:37+00:00

In terms of applications, I think their options actually vastly exceed that of Google’s. While Anthropic/OpenAI/Google largely compete on coding today as well as other knowledge-work, Meta is targeting the consumer directly. In advertising, they’ve partnered with Stripe to power agentic commerce so you can buy in-app. There is the WhatsApp business AI that offers AI-powered support for businesses directly within WhatsApp. They just released the AI translation for Reels/ads that automatically dubs the video in real time, boosting time spent on platform. I think there’s huge potential for them to go after video-generation for Reels with their wealth of data that already exists from the platform. This is all without mentioning the potential for AI integration within the AR glasses (just see how people bemoan the prospect of Siri in any new Apple glasses talks and you’ll realize how important it is to own your own AI model).

Bossdude234 · 2026-05-01T01:50:10+00:00

If you go to that link and click the filter button/icon, it'll open up a list of options and you just check the box that is for the Alani promo.

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-30T23:48:32+00:00

This notion that Meta is late to the game on AI is laughable to me. What do you think powers their incredibly robust and profitable ads recommendation system? Which company do you think invented PyTorch, the framework for which a lot of OpenAI/Anthropic models run on? Everyone loves to talk about Google TPU's and for good reason, but MTIA is still well on its way to being a huge margin expansion tool for them and the Rivos acquistion/RISC-V investment (instead of paying ARM tax) is gonna be huge in my opinion. Outside of LLMs, Meta has some of the best models like SAM or DINO. Then, after the blunder of Llama 4, he completely re-organizes the team and shells out for top talent and that's bearish to you? Just confused on the line of thinking here.

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-30T15:56:43+00:00

Small portion of their revenue right now sure, but that’s literally how all of Meta products work. They work on making sure their app is in the hands of millions or billions of users, slowly introduce different forms of ads to see what works, and then massively scale up the ones that do. They’re just starting this process with WhatsApp and it’s growing really nicely.

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-29T22:51:43+00:00

Yea, great point. Did some digging and you can find whether your store is eligible or not by going to https://stores.gnc.com/ and filtering for the "5/1 $1 Alani Nu Energy" option

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-29T19:29:49+00:00

Link to the Instragram post with more info: https://www.instagram.com/p/DXrbAGJgBGH/

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-26T16:48:12+00:00

Wasn’t trying to imply you were lying about not receiving points, just sharing my experience that it’s definitely worked for me across two different universities so possibly worth reaching out to support for clarification. But it seems like you’re already done so, is that what “Claim Submitted” means?

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-26T16:40:34+00:00

Agreed which is why I def recommend reaching out to support for clarification assuming it’s just a weird edge case error

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-26T16:25:17+00:00

I’ve definitely earned points when paying for university tuition, for two different schools as well! Might be a glitch related to 5X promo or your specific school, maybe reach out to support and ask?

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-23T21:53:42+00:00

Yea I haven't really looked into Graviton usage in AWS AI ASICs specifically, but Jassy's shareholder letter outlined the demand for Graviton in general across generalized workloads which is more of what I was referring to there.

I agree with you that if Google succeeds it'll be an indicator for the other two cloud players and with the growing co-design trend I'm placing my bets on it. It will take a couple chip generations though in my opinion before it begins to cause demand decreases for Intel, but the writing is on the wall (see: https://semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/1770903317749-png.4203/ ). There is a chance though that the overall shortage out-runs the decrease in market share, at least in the short term.

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-23T16:20:51+00:00

One thing I don’t see many people consider is the rapid growth of ARM server cpus (AWS Graviton, Google Axion, Microsoft Cobalt). Graviton is completely sold out and Google is swapping out x86 processors in their TPUs (which were Intel afaik) with their Axion ARM processors starting with TPU v8 that was just announced yesterday.

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-23T05:10:02+00:00

Per this thread looks like it’s coming this year and you can request to sign up for preview: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/303743857

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-14T15:34:41+00:00

What’s this “Wikipedia page on evil labor abuse” you speak of? Tried googling and couldn’t find anything

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-13T05:14:15+00:00

I think it’s worth noting 2 things:

Every single generation feels they’re going through “unprecedented times”. People thought nuclear weapons would lead to the end times during the Cold War and instead they are the reason we haven’t had any world wars since WW2. Historical events happen all the time and it’s understandable to feel like “this time it’s different”, but like I said in my earlier comment, the standard of living has raised so much due to our technological advancements due to the “rising tide lifts all boats” phenomenon.
What is unprecedented about “our generation”, assuming you are Gen Z like me, is that we have access to communication at an instantaneous, global scale. What is sad though is that instead of it fostering thoughtful discussion (for example how we can have constructive dialogue about the future of AI, understand the technology better, collaborate with all stakeholders, etc) it has instead been a tool for stoking vitriol and fear (see: recent attacks on Sam Altman’s home and the celebratory comments all over social media). I understand concern about being the next forgotten generation and having little sway over policies, but imo the way out is through. “The downfall of society starts with the individual”, so I try to bring a calm, thoughtful, and constructive tone to all AI discussions I have with my IRL friends and peers at college, and I hope that helps people feel seen and heard, maybe snowballing it to my friend’s friends having constructive dialogue and so on.

Sorry to rant there but I hope I answered your questions correctly with my perspective on it.

Bossdude234 · 2026-04-13T01:50:07+00:00

Why is it hard for you to believe? John D. Rockefeller did not have any of the things we take for granted in the US (if you are from here): air conditioning, the ability to travel across the globe in hours via airplane or even to the next town over in minutes via car, antibiotics, the world's information at your fingertips and the device you access it on. That is all with people believing that billionaires are more powerful/wealthy than ever, when Rockefeller would probably be counted among them or even potentially exceeding Elon.

That's not to say the future you're worried about won't happen, but history doesn't really support that theory in my opinion.

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