Early Facebook investor says Mark Zuckerberg has been ‘revitalized’
James Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital at the 2018 WEF in Davos, Switzerland.
Adam Galica | CNBC
Venture capitalist and early Facebook investor Jim Breyer said Wednesday that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been reenergized by the company’s recent push into artificial intelligence.
“Post election I’ve traded many messages and spoken to him,” Breyer told CNBC’s Sara Eisen on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “He’s very revitalized.”
Breyer knows Zuckerberg well, having first invested in Facebook in 2005, when it was a fledgling social media site led by a 21-year-old Harvard dropout. It turned out to be one of the most lucrative investments in the history of the venture industry. Breyer said Zuckerberg’s “original vision” was to connect billions of users through the social media platform.
Last year, Zuckerberg made developing and investing in generative AI one of Meta’s top priorities, and the company said it planned to spend billions more on AI infrastructure. Meta, which is building the Llama family of large language models, also launched a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Breyer said he sees Meta emerging as a “top two or three” player in AI within the next five years.
“I think he feels right now with what he’s doing with AI, what he’s doing from a technology standpoint, he feels he’s really unleashed to go for it,” said Breyer, who founded Breyer Capital in 2006 and left Facebook’s board in 2013. “And I think Meta, through a lot of their open source work in AI, is as well positioned in AI as anyone out there.”
Zuckerberg has looked to smooth over relations with President Donald Trump since his election victory as Meta tries to established itself as an AI frontrunner. Meta has made a series of moves to appease the Trump administration. In the weeks leading up to Trump’s second term, Meta pivoted its moderation policies to eliminate third-party fact-checkers, which Zuckerberg said would help “restore free expression.” Meta also added UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, to its board of directors.
Zuckerberg attended Trump’s inauguration ceremony on Monday alongside a handful of other tech CEOs. In addition to OpenAI, which was chosen Tuesday to be part of Trump’s joint venture on AI infrastructure, Meta also competes with Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI. Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s closest advisors, and he leads Trump’s new government efficiency advisory board.
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