Research Scientist Intern

Meta Platforms has become one of Microsoft's largest AI customers, spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to access artificial intelligence models through Azure cloud service. Meta uses trillions of tokens weekly via the platform, according to sources familiar with the matter. Microsoft's AI marketplace, Foundry, had 100,000 customers as of July. However, most large clients remain tech companies rather than traditional industries. ByteDance has generally been the biggest spender, whilst other major customers include Adobe, Perplexity, and Sierra. The revenue concentration highlights concerns about AI adoption. OpenAI alone provided approximately 70% of Microsoft's overall AI revenue in its most recent fiscal year. Meta uses the AI access to assist software development efforts, with developers employing OpenAI technology through Foundry to evaluate their own models' output.

AI is shifting from a software business to a capital-intensive industry as large language models become commodities, according to analysis in Fortune. Since 2023, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta have invested $1.1 trillion in AI infrastructure, with plans to spend another $745 billion this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently stated that "every model is substitutable", whilst Amazon's Andy Jassy predicted "at least half a dozen" comparably good AI models will emerge. This makes financing and scale more important than owning frontier models themselves. Cloud providers are seeing returns despite massive spending. Microsoft's cloud business grew 32% to $39.3 billion, Amazon Web Services rose 37% to $42.2 billion, and Google Cloud surged 82% to $24.8 billion. However, both OpenAI and Anthropic remain loss-making, raising questions about long-term value generation.

A manager has sued Meta Platforms, alleging he was fired for refusing to sign what he believed was an inaccurate immigration reference letter. The lawsuit, filed Monday in New Jersey federal court, claims the letter supporting a product designer's visa petition "materially overstated" the worker's role, including attributing $638 million in advertising revenue to them. The manager revised the letter to include only statements he could "truthfully endorse", according to court documents. He was later terminated despite having no documented performance issues. The complaint alleges retaliation under federal and New Jersey civil rights laws. It also challenges Meta's "selective use" of immigration support for certain Chinese-national employees, claiming the allocation was not governed by neutral criteria. Meta has not responded to requests for comment.