Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man, who is spreading AI into the meta (HT Tech)

for weeks, rumors were spread The company was planning mass layoffs tens of billions of dollars In artificial intelligence. Employees were then told that their keystrokes and mouse clicks would be recorded. To help train AI agents to use the computer.

Some people were adamant on data collection; Other started a petition There are demands from Meta to drop it.

Technology chief Andrew “Boz” Bosworth interjected without apology. Those who asked to get out said no. He asked those who are concerned about privacy not to check personal email on company devices.

As chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s top lieutenant for more than 20 years, Bosworth’s outspokenness and hard-working style have made him a magnet for controversy — and, at times, a useful heat shield for his billionaire boss.

When Zuckerberg became convinced that the virtual reality “metaverse” was Facebook’s future, he put Bosworth in charge of the initiative, which was widely seen as a costly disaster. This was after Meta said Developing battlefield technology For American soldiers, Bosworth joined the army reserveThe move he accepted angered some colleagues.

So when Zuckerberg wanted to transform Meta into an AI-first company with a global workforce of more than 70,000 that could innovate as quickly as an agile startup, he Bosworth tapped to lead This may be his most exciting role yet.

The bald, 6-foot-2-inch executive—who stands to make approximately $1 billion If he could help the company grow its market capitalization by 500% over the next five years – he would have embraced it with enthusiasm.

“He has a very ‘rip-the-band-aid-off’ style for making change,” said Mark Rabkin, a longtime Meta executive and former vice president of its virtual reality efforts.

In a companywide memo a day before the new tracking policy, Bosworth told employees that Meta is moving toward an approach where agents primarily do the work. “Our role is to guide them, review them, and help them improve,” he wrote.

Changes he has advocated in his new role include larger teams with virtually no managers and swapping out planning documents for working prototypes.

“We’re already seeing that some tasks that used to take hours now take minutes, and soon we won’t need to be in the loop on some tasks,” Bosworth wrote.

With all the talk of removing humans from the loop, many Meta employees wonder how many people will be needed to run the company once the transformation is complete. Company on Wednesday… 8,000 people were laid off and rehired another 7,000 into new AI-related jobs.

Meta declined to make Bosworth available for an interview. (News Corp., owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a Content-licensing partnerships With meta.)

He learned to code when he was 10, went to Harvard University and became a teaching assistant in a computer-science course. One of the students assigned to his section was the young Zuckerberg. Class: Introduction to AI.

Facebook came out two weeks after class finals. I am noting the time An alumni profile on Harvard’s site Half a dozen years ago, Bosworth joked that Zuckerberg clearly wasn’t studying.

Unlike some other early Facebook employees, Bosworth remained at Harvard and completed his degree. Before joining Facebook in 2006, he briefly worked at Microsoft as a software design engineer. At that time, the company had less than 100 employees.

Within months of his arrival, Bosworth played a central role in one of Facebook’s first controversies: He was a lead engineer on the News Feed, the scroll of posts that would become the social-media sites’ defining form. Its introduction sparked an outcry among users who felt their privacy had been violated, but engagement increased.

Several years later, when Zuckerberg tried to convert Facebook’s desktop users to a new mobile app, he hired Bosworth to figure out how to do the same for its advertising.

Bosworth knew very little about digital advertising at the time, recalls Alex Himmel, one of Bosworth’s direct reports and now Meta’s vice president of wearables. “He did this big listening tour, and then he came back and said ‘Okay, this is the plan we’re going to do,'” Himmel said.

Since then, Meta’s advertising business has grown to $200 billion per year hope to get ahead Google became the world’s largest digital-advertising seller this year.

If Zuckerberg is famously controlling in his communications with both the public and his own employees, Bosworth is his foil. The latter is known for constantly writing internal corporate strategy memos, answering Meta users’ questions in his weekly Ask-Me-Anything session on Instagram, and sharing his ideas on his podcast called “Bows to the Future.”

He is a frequently seen poster on X, where he has debated with Oculus founder and former Facebook executive Palmer Luckey over the details of Luckey’s 2017 firing and with Elon Musk over the edit button on social media.

While the employees who report to him say they always appreciate where they stand with the boss, Bosworth’s “do-it-yourself” personality has also gotten them into trouble.

In 2016, as the company was coming under increasing scrutiny for its growth-at-all-costs mentality, he posted an internal memo titled “The Ugly”, in which he defended its continued effort, even if it made Facebook a more useful tool for cyberbullies or terrorists.

“The Ugly Truth,” Bosworth wrote“It’s that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *really* good.”

When this memo resurfaced almost two years later and was leaked to the press, it provoked an intense reaction. Bosworth released a public statement on

Bosworth, a self-described liberal, wrote another controversial post – this time on her public Facebook page – shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, insulting his political supporters. Bosworth deleted the post after revealing that Trump voters within the company had said it made them feel unsafe, an episode she described in another internal post in 2020 that was reported on. the new York Times.

Later that year, in a blog post On her personal website, Bosworth recounts a conversation with Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s then-head of operations, about her overbearing manner of communicating. He attempted to debate the issue, and was successful by maintaining his firmness.

“Boz, you’ve been effective despite your behavior,” he said, adding that Sandberg told him, “not because of it.”

As part of the new brand strategy, Zuckerberg appointed Bosworth as chief technology officer and announced plans to focus on building the so-called metaverse under his leadership.

This was a huge promotion even for an executive with so much tenure. But the strategic pivot did not go as planned. About a year after the rebrand, internal document It was revealed that Meta’s flagship Metaverse product, a virtual-reality app for consumers called Horizon Worlds, was plagued with glitches and was struggling to add and retain users.

Five years later, the metaverse still hasn’t started, and the meta has started transfer resources And divert attention from it. The company announced retrenchment in division earlier this year and said it was shifting some spending to other bets that are gaining more momentum, such as ai smart glasses.

In his Instagram ask-me-anything session in March, Bosworth defended the company’s metaverse ambitions, saying that virtual reality is not dead and that the company is continuing to invest in it.

But now most of their attention is on Zuckerberg’s new order to enable the company’s employees to use AI more in their work and to completely delegate the work to it whenever possible.

His new responsibilities include overseeing an entirely new responsibility.Applied AI EngineeringOrganization whose role is to supercharge the efforts of researchers working to develop AI models that can compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

True to form, Bosworth still finds time to post about the AI ​​transformation he’s helping to engineer — and toss it in the comments when he has a hot idea.

Write to Meghan Bobrowski here meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com