Inside Amazon's AI video generator | Kabir Bedi

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:10)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, we're talking about Meta making the news for business practices and privacy violations, Cursor's own hiring practices, the joy of toy software, and how API sprawl is slowing you down. Ben, what's on your mind?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:28)
Well, I can't pass up the opportunity to highlight all of the horrible privacy practices over at Meta, so maybe we can just start there.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:37)
Okay. This is the story that broke the news in the last week, talking about Meta attempting to approach AI engineers from companies like OpenAI, and doing so with huge bonuses and paychecks and sign-on agreements, some of them topping $100 million. Could you imagine a compensation package from a competitor with that kind of price tag attached to it?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:00)
My mind literally cannot fathom what that kind of money feels like or looks like.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:04)
Yeah, so obviously, Sam Altman and Zuckerberg, they took it to the news and there's an old news cycle about this. And Altman proudly said that none of his employees took that offer. They all turned it down and his employees believe in OpenAI. So it obviously became a posturing conversation between the two companies. But it's really interesting to see because only a handful of companies can really play at this level. I mean, $100 million sign on bonus to attempt to poach competitor talent. What about the rest of us? There was a really good post that I saw on LinkedIn talking about this from Mohit Malik that said, real strength is not poaching. It's in growing, retaining and respecting the people you already have. And so that was my positive takeaway of the story of, you know, there's always opportunities to take those $100 million poached deals and invest them internally on making your own engineers the best in the field.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:58)
The thing is that Mark Zuckerberg in particular, I feel like he has a well established history of using the throw money at it strategy to try to solve problems. So on one hand, it actually would not surprise me at all if this was true. If you look at Meta, you know, they really were like an early leader in LLM research and development. And they made a lot of great advancements in open source contributions to the cause. So I think they really do deserve some respect and recognition for their contributions, like in the field of AI. But it really does seem like they are struggling to build AI products that people actually want to use. You know, we've seen like Zuckerberg talking about AI social media bots that interact with you and become your friend, or Meta is out with their new chat interface for AI that some people have been using. But I just feel like there's so many more interesting problems out there to solve with AI that social media just isn't, it's not really it, you know. So I kind of imagine that Zuckerberg feels a little bit behind in all the AI hype. But when I really dig into this, it feels like something's off. Like if this is true, it is truly a ridiculous sum of money. Like, it feels, if it's true, it feels like an attempt to disrupt a competitor rather than any sort of real investment into AI. I personally would not trust this offer unless there was like some sort of substantial compensation that in the case that like Meta revokes this offer suddenly, because I feel like that's a real potential here. But you know, honestly, I just don't really take the personal drama of random tech billionaires too seriously, because at the time of this recording, Zuckerberg hasn't responded to any of this. So it's just the conjecture of a single person, and Altman could be playing his own games here. So, but I will say this, if I were an OpenAI employee, and I heard that my peers are being offered this kind of money, I would start wondering, hey, Altman, am I also worth that much?

**Andrew Zigler** (3:58)
You know, you might turn up your nose at The Real Housewives of Silicon Valley, but I'm definitely going to stay tuned to the gossip, and we'll let our listeners know if any new developments happen.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:07)
Yeah, so I mentioned the Meta privacy stuff, so let's dive into that too, because let's just keep this Meta hate train going a little bit.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:14)
Well, you know, it's a nuanced hate train, but the next part of it is quite interesting, because I think that if Meta can pay $100 billion for signing bonuses, they can probably handle whatever fine they're going to get for breaking GDPR, and DSA, and DMA, and all the other alphabet soups of privacy enforcement out in the world. Because Meta, there was a news broke, another one this week about them, about how they devised an ingenious system called localhost tracking that bypassed even things like Android sandbox protections that protect your identity while browsing in incognito mode. Incognito mode is something that we all take for granted, and obviously, there's always a way for your identity to be compromised while using incognito mode. But how this one worked is basically your Facebook and your Instagram apps, they would set up a hidden intercom basically inside of your device. It was a port that would listen. And so when you would use incognito mode and you would go to websites that had a tracking pixel, that tracking pixel would actually reach out on your local device to that open port and then use that to identify you on Meta's server. So this effectively bypassed all of what incognito mode is intended to do because incognito mode protects you from yourself. It doesn't save anything on your own device. It works on your own device, right? But this works by actually sourcing Meta's tracking pixel from the content you navigate to. By any other definition, you would call this like a virus or a bypass, right? It's doing something that is not visible to you on the surface. So that was a really interesting development that came out this week about how some of the underpinnings of their own software work. I'm sure there's probably going to be more conversations about this massive privacy violation.