Adam Mosseri: AI Is a Tailwind for Authenticity  🔗 **Source:** [Adam Mosseri: AI Is a Tailwind for Authenticity](https://share.snipd.com/episode/c63a18a6-ad33-4fd5-8a20-1b0e1a5ec02c) ## Highlights - **Pods Replace Specialist Heavy Teams** - Small pods of 4–6 generalist engineers plus a single product staff replace baker's-dozen specialist teams to move faster and reduce committee design. - Product staff blend PM, design, data, and research; specialists are pulled in only when truly needed (pricing, novel UX). Transcript: Adam Mosseri Operate slash should operate versus, say, a couple of years ago? It's changed a lot this year. So for the longest time at a big company like ours, the canonical team was something like two or three Android engineers, two or three iOS engineers, two or three server engineers, maybe A generalist, a PM, a designer, a data scientist, a researcher, if you were lucky, and maybe that's about it. So, you know, on the order of a baker's dozen and that is a function of you know you want to have for anybody who's running code someone who can review their code and that's who's familiar With that code base and having these different functions that are more specialized you know i it's very different at a startup. But this year, it's changing. We've adopted what we call pods, which are just mini teams, where it's, call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. One we call product staff, which is sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does and some of what a research does, leveraging the latest tools that we have for them. And then whatever specialist they need. If they're doing something that requires a pricing strategy, you need a senior data scientist. If you're doing something that is really novel from an experience standpoint, you need a very senior product designer. So we try to build a team based on the needs of the work a bit, but then end up with a much smaller core, which is more on the order of six or seven usually. And that is a very big shift that's just happening to us this year. But they, just by virtue of having less people to coordinate, they can often move faster and make better decisions, a little bit less designed by committee. ([Time 0:02:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/79756624-9535-4696-aea9-8a7b47e59c1d)) - **Functional Boundaries Are Blurring** - Functional lines are blurring: data science, design, and research tasks are increasingly doable by generalist product staff using new tools. - Instagram builds internal tools (e.g., automated waterfall analysis) so product staff can run analyses without bespoke data scientist work. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Just have less specialists, right? So you might not have any. You might be four engineers and a product staff. And there's no data scientist. There's no designer. There's no researcher. There's no content designer. The product staff is the generalist that sort of supports all of those things. I mean, what's clearly happening is all the functions are starting to bleed into each other and the whole industry is wrestling with what that means. You know, a lot of what a data scientist does at a big company, for instance, is relatively mechanical. And so, you know, there's stuff that they do that is really more like, you know, art and science and the stuff that's really more like just pulling data, data management. So some of the tools that we're building internally to understand, for instance, a traditional data science question would be a waterfall. So if you wanted to look at people creating reels, you would look at all the steps and then how people fall off on each step and try to figure out where there might be opportunities to improve Things. That kind of basic waterfall analysis is like much easier now to use some of our internal tools to just pool automatically as opposed to having to have a data scientist do a bunch of bespoke Work for that. So a product staff might be able to do that now and they couldn't do that a year ago. So you just end up with these people who have more generalist shapes. And then when you need it, when you really need it, you have a more senior, ideally, or just more creative specialist. So a phenomenal product designer or just a genius data scientist or researcher. ([Time 0:05:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c540d594-d4d4-4ef1-b62d-b50e883152fd)) - **Be Curious And Try Things** - Stay curious and put yourself out there; try things and be willing to sound like an idiot to learn quickly. - Hire for grit, quick learning, and self-awareness — these baseline traits let people adapt as roles shift with AI. Transcript: Lenny Rachitsky And what are some traits that are trending down and maybe less important to you? Adam Mosseri I mean, there are some things that are the same, right? So for the longest time, almost no matter what the function, I always look for three things. Do you have sort of grit? Like, you know, you're kind of like, you're really gonna, you've got some drive, some fire in your belly. Are you a quick learner? Are you you know are you reasonably ideally very self-aware so that you can actually take feedback and know what you're good at know you're not good because if you are those things if You got fire in your belly you learn quickly and you're self-aware you can kind of get good at anything eventually um and but if any of those things are missing that's usually an issue So that's sort of like the baseline right now for hiring, but just for, I think, people who are going to be more successful over these next five or 10 years as things change so significantly, I think two things that I'm continuing to encourage myself to do are to stay curious and to put yourself out there. I just think you've got try things, right? This is like, you know, to that point before, where then no one really knows what's going on. You just have to be willing to try things. It's almost, I don't know, do you speak another language? Russian, yeah. Yeah, so when you learn another language, I think one of the most important things, one of the best predictors, this is my guess, I don't have any research on this, about, you know, are You gonna get good at speaking? Is, are you willing to sound like an idiot? Are you willing just to say it and be corrected and not be offended and then just get better and better? You just have to put yourself out there. And with all of these new tools and models and technologies, I think you just have to be willing to try stuff. So if you're curious and you try stuff, I think that'll, you know, you'll learn, you'll adapt. But if you're not curious or you're not willing to make mistakes or try things i think you're in a ton of trouble or these are things can be a really difficult time so those i think are premiums Not just for hiring at a company like meta or a team like instagram but i just think across the industry and multiple industries over the next 10 to 20 years is there something that maybe We're looking for less of? ([Time 0:14:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c5de42a1-9764-40cb-bb60-53912e71bed6)) - **AI Changes Job Shapes Not Just Skills** - AI shifts job shapes: engineers now spend more time planning and reviewing code rather than writing it, and non-technical people can contribute more due to lowered barriers. - Success depends on whose strengths align with evolving tools and business needs. Transcript: Adam Mosseri I mean, the job is just different. I mean, take engineering. Engineering used to be, maybe not majority, but a large percentage, 40, 50, 60% writing code. You know, it's not now, especially if you talk to anybody in these labs, they're spending most of their time planning and reviewing code. That is a very different job. You might hate that and you might have loved just writing code or you might have, you might love that and you might not have been that fast at writing code. So, you know, who, who succeeds is a function of whose strengths are aligned with the tools, needs, and the business's needs. And so this is definitely happening. Another thing is you've had people who had good ideas about how to contribute to other functions, but didn't have the mechanical or technical skills to do so. And AI reduces the boundary to do that. And then all of a sudden they can't. For me, it's kind of funny because when i got hired at facebook we all the designers had to be able to program that was like our i had i went through a technical loop we gave up on that because It was too hard to hire people um but i now get to program again for the first time in maybe 10 years and you know i am not a good engineer i'm a mediocre engineer on a good day But now I can write Code responsibly, which is just an amazing thing. You're seeing this across all sorts of levels in seniority and functions. You know, designers who are programming, engineers who are pulling data and doing strong analyses, data scientists who are putting together proposals for designs. You know, the tools aren't all great, by the way. I think too often we have this really polarized binary outlook on the state of AI. Like, are you AI-pilled or are you anti-AI? It's like people aren't binary. I said that to the team yesterday. And the state of the tools isn't binary either you know they're amazing at some things and remarkably bad at others and the people who i think are gonna make the most of it are the ones who Are clear-eyed about what ai is good at and what it's not good at and also have an instinct or a nose for what it will be good at and not good at you know, not, you know, next month or in a couple Months from now. ([Time 0:17:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7334dfbc-14aa-497c-b694-c4e7c8bb810d)) - **Spend Brains On Vision And Strategy** - Focus human effort on vision and strategy where judgment and controversial, opinionated choices matter. - Treat strategy as an opinionated path people can reasonably disagree with, not generic goals like "be the best." Transcript: Lenny Rachitsky Taste, like we talked about, judgment, particularly around strategy, right? Adam Mosseri Like you're not, you might get feedback from an AI on the strategy, but you're not asking an AI to come up with a strategy anytime soon. Or if you are, then it's within the context of bounds you set. So here's my goal, here's my vision, here are my constraints, here's my job, here's my budget. I think that it looks more like management, right? Like you are trying to define what success looks like, decide how prescriptive you want to be about the path to success and then giving feedback along the way and that is its own craft You know and you it'll be interesting to see how matt you know you know some of the same dynamics come up like i believe that if you are too prescriptive as a leader with a team you end up stifling Good ideas but if you're too open-ended sometimes teams just waste time um going in the wrong direction and so that level of autonomy you give a team like maybe that applies to main agents In the future particularly when we're talking not just about building something but deciding what you build in the first place. But I think of vision as an articulation of the world or the state of the product you want to get to. And I think of strategy as an opinionated path to achieve that vision. Strategy can't be like, be the best or be amazing. It has to be controversial. You have to be, a reasonable person should be able to disagree with it because otherwise you're probably just trying to compete on raw execution. And I think both vision and strategy, I think, are going to be where our brains are spending a lot of our, more and more of our cycles. And I think less on execution. ([Time 0:24:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a48c4dc2-c0e4-469c-8501-1191f2cb9c2b)) - **Embeddings Were Opaque Until LLMs Explained Them** - Instagram's recommender historically used opaque embeddings, not human-readable semantics, but LLMs can now translate embedding-space clusters into topics. - That enables features like "see your algorithm" where users can view and edit inferred interests. Transcript: Adam Mosseri One of the most common misconceptions is actually in the opposite direction. I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is. Most of what's really driven the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five, 10 years have been, you know, these large embedding models and these other techniques that Basically produce artifacts that cannot be read by people. They're not legible. They're like giant vectors. It's like, sure, I can show you the vector, but it's just going to be a bunch of numbers in like a seven dimensional space. It's like, and so when, when we talk about, does the algorithm know something, usually we think in these more semantic terms. It knows I like surfing. And it's like, it doesn't. It just has this big ass number that happens to correlate with surfing. That said, I think that is starting to change. Right? I think that what, one of the things that LLMs are enabling is they can describe in, you know, words, you know, English for, or whatever language you prefer, what some of those previously Illegible artifacts are at least proximate to, if not mean directly, right? So this is like the thing I've been really, I posted about this this week, this thing called your algorithm. Basically the idea is we take a look at all of the stuff that you've interacted with. And then, you know, we, all of that is in an embedding space. You can think of embedding space as a map. You can map a bunch of videos into the same map. And so videos that are close are similar and now we can just have an lm just be like describe that part of the map and it can be like oh that is like deep pour over coffee snobbery and um and Lenny Rachitsky That's kind of amazing that is so cool that like you can ask the lm to look at these numbers and extrapolate here's like the topic that you're interested in yeah or look at at the videos Adam Mosseri And so the way you um both and so you can also embed concepts into that same space and so i mean embeddings are really the underlying technology underneath llms right that's how the whole Thing works and so you know so what what we what we what we do now is we let you you know quote unquote see your algorithm. ([Time 0:34:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80e1adcb-32bf-4117-bb21-c054b6977160)) - **Chronological Feeds Harm Overall Satisfaction** - Pure chronological feeds create perverse incentives: high-frequency publishers flood followers while friends post rarely, reducing personal relevance and long-term satisfaction. - Instagram tests show usage and sentiment fall when chronological becomes default. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Yeah, it's tough because, I mean, I posted this week, this thing about agency, and I just got destroyed in the comments, which is just part of the job. I get it, right? But there are a couple issues with the chronological feed. So one is, and some of this is the tension between an individual's interests and what works when you scale it up, right? So if you do a pure chronological feed, the incentive for everybody is to just post as much as possible because it will always be at the top of everyone who follows you's feed as soon as You post. So what ends up happening is that the feed gets overwhelmed with professional content, with usually large company content and publishers, because they get, you know, the New York Times can pump out 50 things a day. Your best friend won't. You might get one thing a week from them. And so your feed just gets taken over. So part of it is the incentives that emerge, because when you design these systems, it's almost like designing a city. You need to think about, okay, here's how the mechanics work. What are the incentives that arise? How are people going to act within those incentives? And then what happens? And the other thing is, sometimes the most interesting thing was just not the most recent thing. Recency is an important input into relevance, but it's not the only one. My sister got engaged last night. And, you know, she's in Germany. No, she didn't. If she did, she's married. Got married last year that's why it was tough in mind but if she got engaged you know and i missed it because she lives in europe and you know with different time differences like do i really Want to see a picture of like my brother's pobo sandwich you know pobo sandwich or do i want to like see my sister's things first so i i it's tough it's tough i'd love to figure out a way to Find the right balance i want to give people agency over the experience but i think it needs to be in a way that creates a system that makes sense not just for us as a business which matters I'm not pretending that's not an issue but also for the overall community because we've done chronological by default and where you can make it default and you see not only does usage Go down, overall sentiment goes down. ([Time 0:38:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d97143a6-cd47-4754-b186-1e2e929a5136)) - **AI Content Is A Tailwind For Creator Platforms** - Rise of AI-generated content is likely a tailwind for Instagram because users will seek authentic, person-driven creativity amid abundant synthetic media. - Instagram's strength is its scale of creators and investment in tools that surface individuals' points of view. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Think it's going to be a tailwind but i think it's going to be a challenge it's and not just because it's more content obviously we're an attention business driven business we're an advertising Business more content means potentially more attention that's not for free though like i don't think we're very good at ranking ai content yet there's great ai content there's crap Ai content you should just see the stuff you're interested in and not any of the stuff you're not interested in. But I do think that in a world where, or for years now, and I've said this many times, power shifting from institutions to individuals across industries. The easiest example of sports where players are more relevant than teams now, and that was not the case when I was a kid. In that world, I think it behooves us to invest in individuals and to invest in specifically for Instagram and creators. And I mean creators broadly. I don't just mean influencers who are promoting branded content and making native-only videos. I mean anybody who's using platforms like Instagram to help do what they do, right? It could be, you could be a journalist, you could be an artist, you could be selling scarves you sew, but like you're out there as yourself creating and sharing content that helps you Achieve whatever it is you're trying to do. So we've been leaning in that direction for many years now. That's been one of our two or three most important audiences for as long as i've been on instagram in a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content i actually think people are Going to seek out creativity and authenticity and people more not less and i think that that will help us that doesn't mean that we won't have ai content on our platform there's going To be bad and good ai content and we're going to try and handle that, you know, the way we normally handle content. So unsafe goes away. Interesting versus not interesting is based on ranking and personalization. But I think people are going to really seek out other points of view because Instagram was never just about the content. It was always about, to a certain degree, the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective. And I think that's going to become more important, not less. And I think given that we are not the best at a lot of things, but we are the largest creator platform. ([Time 0:41:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23213d20-3549-4699-9f05-bebb348c339f)) - **Label Content And Account Authenticity** - Label content provenance and account authenticity so users can decide trust and belief; prioritize honesty about confidence in detection. - Consider labeling camera-captured (non-AI) content as a practical long-term approach. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Maybe we'll end up in the same place but there's a difference between marking content and marking accounts and they're both useful and interesting so if content was created with AI, I think you should be able to know that. That's hard by the way, because we can detect that right now, but as these models get better, we might lose the ability to detect that. So we should also be very careful to be honest with you about how confident we are in our own sort of assessment. But I think you should be able to just ask, be like, hey, is this AI? And we should be able to tell you who we think it probably is, or we're not sure, or it's definitely not, or it definitely is. I actually think we might be more practical to label camera captured content, like basically non-AI content, as opposed to labeling AI content long-term for a couple reasons but then At the account level i think it also matters there is definitely an a new spam vector which is these fake accounts which by the way an ai creator that's fine there's nothing wrong with That necessarily but there is there are these spam vectors which are trying to abuse that and you know they're selling like you know bogus supplements And it's like an AI monk. And it doesn't present it. It's not obvious that it's an AI. And it's just trying to take advantage of a certain aesthetic or a certain sort of stereotype. We need to figure out how to crack down on that. And so I do think we should be making sure that you know. Basically, you just need to know. And then you can make your own informed decision. ([Time 0:46:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a4e87cd0-19da-4c21-9b27-a6211955f25e)) - **Exploration Ranking Helps Small Creators Break Out** - Exploration-based ranking (testing niche content on diverse users) helps small creators break out, an area Instagram borrowed inspiration from TikTok. - Instagram has invested in originality, recency, and exploration to surface niche talent. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Everybody, so many people do so much. I mean, for me, like one of the things that we are finally catching up with, but I've been always very impressed with is TikTok and their recommenders' ability to break small talent. In the world of ranking and recommenders, you can talk about exploitation-based ranking. That sounds terrible, but it just means like using the data you have. And then you can talk about exploration based ranking going and trying to figure out you know what someone might be interested in that they might even not know they're interested in Yet and it is much easier to move engagement by showing people stuff that you know they'll probably like because lots of people like it, it's much harder to go and figure out how to essentially Test content so that we can see like, hey, maybe you, sure you like Bieber, but you might also like Afropunk. And so we're just gonna like show you some Afropunk and see what happens. If you do the latter, this exploration-based ranking, I think it's really good for niche creators and small creators because you give them a chance to find an audience that either wasn't Going to see them before or didn't even know that they were interested before so we've invested a lot over the last couple years in ranking not just increasing engagement but increasing Originality increasing the number of uh pieces of content that break out, increasing recency to stay culturally relevant. And so a lot of that has been inspired by TikTok and ByteDance. I think we're catching up. There's actually a couple of those areas where we, I think, by the best we can tell, we're ahead of them. There's a couple where we're still behind. But we have line of sight to, I think, being the best in class at recommendations for the first time during my tenure. ([Time 0:48:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/04d2bf6f-8873-4e54-8649-0333860e8db5)) - **Launching Facebook Home Taught Hard Platform Lessons** - Facebook Home was a spectacular failure that taught Mosseri carrier/OEM and OS-level product realities early in his PM career. - He declared himself PM after the PM quit and learned faster by executing a dead-end project to closure. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Oh, a bunch. So many. So I'll give you two maybe. So before Instagram, my first project as a PM was on a project called Facebook Home, which was a sort of fork of Android at the operating system level and a piece of hardware with HTC. It was a spectacular failure. I learned way more in that year, year and a half, and I did it any year, I think probably in my career. Because I was just a design manager before that. I declared myself a PM because the PM on the project quit and I just threw myself head first in understanding carriers and OEMs and certification as well as Android and operating systems And just learned a ton. And I'm happy I brought that project to an end because it had been going on for a long time. And sometimes the best thing you can do is execute an idea that doesn't have market fit well just to decide whether or not the idea was a good idea in the first place. Another big mistake I made during my Instagram tenure was the first version of Reels was built on top of stories. Stories had a ton of momentum. This was, I think, 2019. And we were trying to build Reels into stories because we were trying to build on the thing that was growing the fastest. But it was not a strong foundation. Most, you know, the read-through rate on stories is relatively low. There's way more stories than most people have time to consume. So most of the reels were never seen and then they disappeared. ([Time 1:00:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/172d3b9e-043e-4319-b577-bfd7216571cf)) - **First Reels Built On The Wrong Foundation** - The first Reels was mistakenly built on Stories, so most Reels were unseen and disappeared, costing Instagram positioning against TikTok pre-pandemic. - Mosseri regrets extending an existing primitive instead of building a new foundation for short-form video. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Stories had a ton of momentum. This was, I think, 2019. And we were trying to build Reels into stories because we were trying to build on the thing that was growing the fastest. But it was not a strong foundation. Most, you know, the read-through rate on stories is relatively low. There's way more stories than most people have time to consume. So most of the reels were never seen and then they disappeared. And if we had the version of reels that we launched in like mid, just maybe we think it's like the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2019, I think, I don't think TikTok isn't, I think TikTok Is still big and important but I don't think it's as big as it is now because when they really took off was when the pandemic hit and a bunch of people had a lot of time at home and we're looking For a little bit of joy and we're totally fine with our phone having sound on and so if you look at the numbers the 2020 is when they exploded and we were out of position and on one hand you Know i'm a designer i'm trying to not add new things to the product i'm trying to extend existing primitives and that was the idea on the other hand i was wrong and and it's a pretty big fork In the road if you just look at the overall business over the last eight years we ([Time 1:01:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24a0190a-69e8-45b1-8920-fcda4021839e)) - **Set Boundaries And Teach Kids To Create Not Just Consume** - Set boundaries and approve apps for kids; earn screen time through tasks and co-learn productive uses like building games together. - Mosseri gives his 10-year-old time after homework and teaches him to build a 19-level platformer via cloud coding. Transcript: Adam Mosseri Also about education and having conversations with them. But my kids are too young to use social media. They're 10, 8, and 6. But they each have an iPad. They have to earn their time. So they have different ways they earn their time. It's usually about like sitting down to do your homework three times for half an hour each. Gets you a total of 90 minutes on the weekend. And then they can use that time on the weekend. But you kind of have to set that boundary where it's like you can't just be they ask for it and you give it to them. I think that matters a lot. And then I'm pretty opinionated about what they do on it. I approve what apps that they have. I think parents should be approving what apps kids specifically are downloading onto their devices. We've been advocating for this at a policy level for a long time at Meta. I think those things help a lot. There are some exceptions. One is planes. It's just like about surviving. I don't know if you've ever, for those of you who are parents. I'm going to be, yeah. Yeah. It's like, you just like, that's just like, all right, you know, we're flying, you know, it's a 10 hour flight or eight hour flight. It's like, yeah, I just, just, you just need to get through it. Um, the other one that I'm starting to experiment with my 10 year old with is, so schools are interesting. Cause I think I'm pretty supportive of a no phone in classrooms. Um, that's happening more and more. I think that's probably good for education. And I do also know in the world of AI that there's concern about kids using AI and not learning critical thinking skills. And I think that's a valid concern. But I also am worried about kids not learning how to leverage AI and then being sort of at a disadvantage. So that's a balance. I think you need both. So with my eldest we started, um, vibe coding recently together. Um, he's just loves video games. So I was like, all right, let's make a video game. And so he's made this 19 level platformer game that kind of looks like an eight bit version of super Mario from when I was a kid, but like each level has its own theme, its own types of monsters. There's a store where you can buy different skins or weapons. It's unbelievable what a 10-year who still types with three fingers can do with just a couple hours of sitting together. More of like a, I want you to learn how to make things. I want you to be thinking, not just playing games. And I'm going to sit with you and we're going to do this together. So to me, these are the things that matter. ([Time 1:03:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bcbc7eb9-0496-485e-9cd9-9d726e8df236))