Deadline columnist Peter Bart notes that the tech titans immortalised in *The Social Network* nearly 16 years ago are returning to screens, this time in darker, more conflicted portrayals reflecting real-world anxieties about artificial intelligence. Upcoming films such as *The Social Reckoning* (with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg) and *Artificial* (starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman) depict tech leaders as feuding, narcissistic figures grappling with AI's unpredictable consequences, mirroring commentary from outlets like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal warning that the industry may be "eating itself".

The article highlights contradictory public statements from AI executives as evidence of the sector's uncertainty: Altman admits the industry misjudged AI's social impact even as OpenAI plans $600 billion in infrastructure spending against just $2 billion in monthly revenue, while Zuckerberg predicted AI would create jobs before cutting 8,000 of them, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei forecast mass entry-level job losses only to deepen his own company's cuts shortly after. Other tech leaders offer clashing predictions on the future working week, from Zoom's Eric Yuan (three days) to Bill Gates (two) and Elon Musk (work becoming optional entirely), while *Artificial* itself had a troubled path to release after Amazon MGM dropped it before Neon picked it up for next month.