Andrew Bosworth, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, is at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution at the company. As Mark Zuckerberg's most trusted lieutenant, he is prepared to cut jobs and encroach on professional privacy to achieve the company's goals. Tensions have been high at Meta, which recently laid off 8,000 employees, approximately 10% of its global workforce. Prior to this, employees were informed that their keystrokes and mouse clicks would be monitored to train AI agents to use computers, effectively training their own replacements. While some objected to the data collection, others started a petition asking the company to abandon the practice. However, when Bosworth stepped in, he offered no apologies and refused to allow employees to opt out, advising them to stop opening personal emails on company devices if they were concerned about privacy invasion.
Leading Meta
Known as "Boz," Bosworth has been Zuckerberg's top deputy for over two decades. His outspoken nature and style have made him a magnet for controversy, while also serving as a useful shield for his boss. When Zuckerberg became convinced that the virtual reality "metaverse" was Facebook's future, Bosworth was put in charge of the initiative. When Meta announced it was developing battlefield technology for American soldiers, Bosworth joined the Army Reserve. Now, as Zuckerberg aims to transform Meta into a global AI giant, Bosworth has been given the reins. The 6-foot-2 executive stands to earn nearly $1 billion if he can increase the company's market capitalization by 500% in the next five years. In his new role, he has created large teams with virtually no managers and replaced planning documents with working prototypes. "We're already seeing some tasks that used to take hours now take minutes and soon we won't need to be in the loop on some tasks at all," Bosworth told the Wall Street Journal.
Who is Andrew Bosworth?
Andrew Bosworth grew up on his family's horse ranch in Saratoga, California, surrounded by agriculture and the state's 4-H youth program. He learned to code at age 10 and later attended Harvard University, where he became a teaching assistant for a computer science course. In a twist of fate, one of the students assigned to his section was a young Mark Zuckerberg, and the class was Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Two weeks after the final exam, Facebook was launched. While most early Facebook employees dropped out, Bosworth stayed to complete his degree. He then worked at Microsoft as a software design engineer before joining Facebook in 2006.
Within months, Bosworth was leading News Feed, the scrolling stream of posts that came to define social media. Its introduction sparked outrage among users who felt their privacy was violated, but it sent engagement soaring. When Zuckerberg wanted to shift Facebook from desktop to mobile, Bosworth was assigned to advertising, despite knowing little about digital advertising at the time. According to Alex Himel, 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, 'All right, here's the plan we're going to do.'"
Bosworth Inside
Over the years, Bosworth has developed a reputation as a blunt and outspoken provocateur. He controls Zuckerberg's communication with the public and Meta employees, pens internal corporate strategy memos, answers questions from Meta users in his weekly ask-me-anything sessions, and hosts a podcast called "Boz to the Future." While many appreciate his no-nonsense personality, his abrasiveness has occasionally landed him in trouble. In 2016, as the company faced increasing scrutiny for its growth-at-all-costs mindset, he posted an internal memo titled "The Ugly," defending the company's relentless pursuit even if it made Facebook a more useful tool for cyberbullies or terrorists. "The ugly truth," Bosworth wrote, "is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good." The memo sparked internal backlash and led to online trolling when it leaked two years later. Also in 2016, he posted an anti-Trump message on his Facebook page, which was later deleted after Trump voters within the company said it made them feel unsafe.
Metaverse at the Top
In 2017, Bosworth left the ads division to lead Facebook's augmented reality and virtual reality efforts, a division that took center stage when Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021. He was soon appointed chief technology officer. While Meta planned to launch a flagship metaverse product, a virtual reality app for consumers called Horizon Worlds, it suffered from glitches and struggled to attract and retain users. Five years later, Meta has shifted resources away from the metaverse and focused on other bets, such as AI smartglasses. Bosworth is now focused on embedding AI into Meta's fabric, getting workers to use AI more in their work and, if possible, handing over tasks to it entirely. Among his new roles is overseeing an entirely new "applied AI engineering" organization, whose job is to supercharge the efforts of researchers working to develop AI models that can compete with those from OpenAI and Anthropic.
