It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth and buy into the hype.She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets. What we're calling AI will continue to have certain uses, but investors will realize that the moonshot being promised is undeliverable and a lot of jobs will disappear. This will hurt the wider industry, and the economy by extension.
miki123211 · 1h ago
I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
bryanlarsen · 58m ago
Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices.
Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
tombert · 13m ago
Today I learned that Sears founded Prodigy!
Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
htrp · 10m ago
Blame short sighted investors asking Sears to "focus"
outside1234 · 10m ago
Newton at Apple is another great one, though they of course got there.
thefourthchime · 5m ago
I'm starting to agree with this viewpoint. As the technology seems to solidify to roughly what we can do now, the aspirations are going to have to get cut back until there's a couple more breakthroughs.
skeezyboy · 1h ago
>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.
echelon · 58m ago
Speaking of Netflix -
I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.
Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.
I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.
For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
realo · 4m ago
As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :)
Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.
didibus · 36m ago
You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact.
The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.
That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.
I think that's what not happened yet.
Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
mh- · 40m ago
It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving.
The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
Q6T46nT668w6i3m · 1h ago
There’s no evidence that it’ll scale like that. Progress in AI has always been a step function.
ghurtado · 28m ago
There's also no evidence that it won't, so your opinion carries exactly the same weight as theirs.
> Progress in AI has always been a step function.
There's decisively no evidence of that, since whatever measure you use to rate "progress in AI" is bound to be entirely subjective, especially with such a broad statement.
ninetyninenine · 29m ago
Uh it’s been multiple repeated step ups in the last 15 years. The trending is up up up.
nutjob2 · 1h ago
> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do
I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.
Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
torginus · 1h ago
It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).
benterix · 1h ago
It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0].
The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.
alecsm · 45m ago
Success happens when luck meets hard work.
UltraSane · 38m ago
Every billionaire could have died from childhood cancer.
marknutter · 1h ago
This is just a cope for people who aren't successful. Most people who are successful have a massive string of failed attempts in their past, but they're good at picking themselves back up and trying again and following through when "luck" finally strikes.
oa335 · 55m ago
What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?
gdbsjjdn · 48m ago
They failed to not go to an Ivy League school and failed to have poor parents.
thebigspacefuck · 30m ago
Alexa, Metaverse, being decent human beings
ghurtado · 17m ago
When you are still one of the top 3 richest people in the world after your mistake, that is not a "failure" in the way normal people experience it. That is just passing the time.
lucianbr · 41m ago
Or Gates or Buffet.
That claim is just patently false.
Miraste · 43m ago
This might be true for a normal definition of success, but not lottery-winner style success like Facebook. If you look at Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, the founders all have few or zero previous attempts at starting a business. My theory is that this leads them to pursue risky behavior that more experienced leaders wouldn't try, and because they were in the right place at the right time, that earned them the largest rewards.
michaelt · 41m ago
This is just cope for people with a massive string of failed attempts and no successes.
Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.
tovej · 51m ago
IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N.
Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?
ghurtado · 21m ago
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Some will read this and laser in on the "socialism" part, but obviously the interesting bit is the second half of the quote.
code_for_monkey · 47m ago
this is also just cope
jocaal · 1h ago
Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
miki123211 · 1h ago
I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
whodidntante · 1h ago
There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness
woooooo · 23m ago
Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
ghurtado · 11m ago
> They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
This is now my favorite way of describing fleeting hype-tech.
benterix · 1h ago
Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).
nirav72 · 53m ago
>luck, skill and hard work.
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
vovavili · 1h ago
Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.
estearum · 1h ago
Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others.
There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
skeezyboy · 1h ago
for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?
dylan604 · 33m ago
But then we wouldn't have had that great soundtrack from Trent and Atticus
dgfitz · 59m ago
What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.
Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.
What risk?
ghurtado · 24m ago
When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.
PhantomHour · 1h ago
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst
and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
NickC25 · 1h ago
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders.
He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
travisgriggs · 10m ago
Ha ha.
You used “honest” and “businessman” in the same sentence.
Good one.
_Algernon_ · 1h ago
You should read Careless People if this boggles your mind.
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
balamatom · 34m ago
I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead
I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
ghurtado · 41s ago
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?
It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
saubeidl · 1h ago
It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.
blitzar · 56m ago
> record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI
That was soooo 2 weeks ago.
throawaywpg · 47m ago
The line was to buy Amazon as it was undervalued a la IBM or Apple based on its cloud computing capabilities relative to the future (projected) needs of AI.
baby · 1h ago
As someone using LLMs daily, it's always interesting to read something about AI being a bubble or just hype. I think you're going to miss the train, I am personally convinced this is the technology of our lifetime.
GoatInGrey · 50m ago
You are welcome to share how AI has transformed a revenue generating role. Personally, I have never seen a durable example of it, despite my excitement with the tech.
In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.
cm2012 · 7m ago
I know a company that replaced their sales call center with an AI calling bot instead. The bot got better sales and higher feedback scores from customers.
conartist6 · 52m ago
I'll say it again since I've said it a million times, it can be useful and a bubble. The logic of investors before the last market crash was something like "houses are useful, so no amount of hype around the housing market could be a bubble"
Windchaser · 28m ago
Or, quite similarly, the internet bubble of the large ‘90s
Very obviously the internet is useful, and has radically changed our lives. Also obviously, most of the high stock valuations of the ‘90s didn’t pan out.
mrits · 1h ago
I think we will see the opposite. If we made no progress with LLMs we'd still have huge advancements and growth opportunities enhancing the workflows and tuning them to domain specific tasks.
evilduck · 1h ago
I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.
Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
No comments yet
sebstefan · 1h ago
I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up.
My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.
I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
OtherShrezzing · 1h ago
I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.
HDThoreaun · 35m ago
With gpt5 I’m not sure this is true. Certainly openAI is still losing money but if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable.
hearsathought · 1h ago
> It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?
> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).
So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.
> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?
> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.
But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
Hilift · 2h ago
META has only made $78.7 billion operating income in the past 12 months of returns. Time to buckle up!
It's really difficult to wrap one's head around the cash they're able to deploy.
stripe_away · 34m ago
how does this compare to the depreciation cost of their datacenters?
nashashmi · 2h ago
An astonishing number
TrackerFF · 4h ago
I really do wonder if any of those rock star $100m++ hires managed to get a 9-figure sign-on bonus, or if the majority have year(s) long performance clauses.
Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.
gdbsjjdn · 2h ago
I'm sure everyone is doing just fine financially, but I think it's common knowledge that these kind of comp packages are usually a mix of equity and cash earned out over multiple years with bonuses contingent on milestones, etc. The eye-popping top-line number is insane but it's also unlikely to be fully realized.
krona · 2h ago
Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.
tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.
boringg · 2h ago
Its a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.
chatmasta · 1h ago
So wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?
boringg · 1h ago
Wage suppression? Its the opposite were talking about here. Pay large amounts of money to make sure people don't work on challenging problems.
But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.
respondo2134 · 56m ago
This is the Gavin Belson strategy to starve Pied Piper of distributed computing experts; nobody get's to work on his Signature Edition Box 3!
meesles · 2h ago
This has never been the goal of any business, despite what they say.
sgt101 · 1h ago
We should also say that "being really lucky is the best way to make sure that other people don't have as much luck as you do"
KaiserPro · 1h ago
Its all in RSUs
Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.
That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares
nilkn · 22m ago
If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.
torginus · 1h ago
I'm not an academic, but it kinda feels strange to me to stipulate in your contract that you must invent harder
indoordin0saur · 2h ago
I've heard of high 7-figure salaries but no 9 figure salaries. Source for this?
"The New Orleans Saints have signed Taysom Hill to a record $40M contract"
saubeidl · 2h ago
Must feel real good to get a golden ticket out of the bubble collapse when it's this imminent.
seydor · 2h ago
That's a man with conviction
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Sorry, I was in the metaverse just now. I took my headset off though — could you please repeat that?
loloquwowndueo · 1h ago
Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?
adastra22 · 1h ago
You will have no genitals, and you will like it.
cuckerberg432 · 22m ago
But genitals is like, the whole point of VR!
zeristor · 1h ago
Didn't Meta invest big into the Metaverse, then back track on that, was it $20 billion.
I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.
rtkwe · 15m ago
They didn't just invest they made it core to their identity with the name change and it just fell so so flat because the claims were nonsense hype for crypto pumps. We already had stuff like VR Chat (still going pretty strong) it just wasn't corporate and sanitized for sale and mass monetization.
coffeebeqn · 1h ago
They did indeed - see their current name
eep_social · 1h ago
> was it $20 billion
more like 40, yes
byyoung3 · 2h ago
clickbait. read the article. they just spent several billion hiring a leadership team. They are doing an all hands to figure out what they need to do.
willsmith72 · 2h ago
yes, because meta has no incentive to act like there's no bubble
Capricorn2481 · 1h ago
So it's not clickbait, even though the headline does not reflect the contents of the article, because you believe the headline is plausible?
I think AI is a bubble, but there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble. Sounds like they are spending even more money per researcher.
rudedogg · 2h ago
Metaverse people: “We’re so back!”
nabla9 · 4h ago
Quality over quantity.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person.
So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.
If you're trying to build a bunch of Wendy's locations, it's clearly better to have more construction workers.
It's less clear that if you're trying to build SGI that you're better off with 1000 people than 10.
It might be! But it might not be, too. Who knows for certain til post-ex?
lelanthran · 4h ago
> 1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person.
I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month.
Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it?
The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children".
You are definitely going to overrun your ETA if your target is 100 children in 9 months using only 100 women.
IOW, this is a facile comparison not worthy of consideration.[1]
> So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.
This[1] is not the type of problem where the analogy applies.
=====================================
[1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!
phkahler · 2h ago
>> Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it?
Your designing one thing. You're building one plant. Yes, you'll make and sell millions of widgets in the end but the system that produces them? Just one.
Engineering teams do become less efficient above some size.
ethbr1 · 2h ago
You'd think someone would have written a book on the subject.
You might well be making 100 AI babies, and seeing which one turns out to be the genius.
We shouldn’t assume that the best way to do research is just through careful, linear planning and design. Sometimes you need to run a hundred experiments before figuring out which one will work. Smart and well-designed experiments, yes, but brute force + decent theory can often solve problems faster than just good theory alone.
Ah the new strategy - hire one rockstar woman who can gestate 1000 babies per year for $100 mil!
earthnail · 3h ago
The analogy is a good analogy. It is used to demonstrate that a larger workforce doesn’t always automatically give you better results, and that there is a set of problems that are clear to identify a priori where that applies. For some problems, quality is more important than quantity, and you structure your org respectively. See sports teams, for example.
In this case, you want one foundation model, not 100 or 1000. You can’t afford to build 1000. That’s the one baby the company wants.
lelanthran · 2h ago
> In this case, you want one foundation model, not 100 or 1000. You can’t afford to build 1000. That’s the one baby the company wants.
I am going to repeat the footnote in my comment:
>> [1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!
IOW, if you're looking for specifically for quality, you can't bet everything on one horse.
ethbr1 · 2h ago
You're ignoring that each foundation model requires sinking enormous and finite resources (compute, time, data) into training.
At some point, even companies like Meta need to make a limited number of bets, and in cases like that it's better to have smarter than more people.
skywhopper · 2h ago
In re Wendy’s, it depends on whether you have a standard plan for building the Wendy’s and know what skills you need to hire for. If you just hire 10,000 random construction workers and send them out with instructions to “build 100 Wendy’s”, you are not going to succeed.
tim333 · 2h ago
One person who's figured how to make ASI is more useful than a bunch that haven't. Not sure that actually applies anywhere.
coffeebeqn · 1h ago
It’s me. I’ve figured it out. Who’s got the offer letter so I can start?
butlike · 2h ago
I'd rather pay $0 to n people if all they're going to do is make vibe-coded dogshit that spins it's wheels and loses context all the time.
doctorpangloss · 1h ago
The reason they paid $100m for “one person” is because it was someone people liked to work for, which is why this article is a big deal.
42lux · 4h ago
What I don't get is that they are gunning for the people that brought us the innovations we are working with right now. How often does it happen that someone really strikes gold a second time in research at such a high level? It's not a sport.
kkoncevicius · 4h ago
Even if they do not strike gold the second time, there can still be a multitude of reasons:
1. The innovators will know a lot about the details, limitations and potential improvements concerning the thing they invented.
2. Having a big name in your research team will attract other people to work with you.
3. I assume the people who discovered something still have a higher chance to discover something big compared to "average" researchers.
4. That person will not be hired by your competition.
cma · 3h ago
5. Having a lot of very publicly extremely highly paid people will make people assume anyone working on AI there is highly paid, if not quite as extreme. What most people who make a lot of money spend it on is wealth signalling, and now they can get a form of that without the company having to pay them as much.
stogot · 3h ago
What good is a wealth signal without wealth?
You’re promoting vacuous vanity
andai · 2h ago
Higher status, access to higher quality mates, etc.
cma · 2h ago
It might even play role in getting you to US President
cma · 1h ago
> promoting
Where?
this_user · 4h ago
Who else would you hire? With a topic as complex as this, it seems most likely that the people who have been working at the bleeding edge for years will be able to continue to innovate. At the very least, they are a much safer bet than some unproven randos.
A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth and buy into the hype.She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets. What we're calling AI will continue to have certain uses, but investors will realize that the moonshot being promised is undeliverable and a lot of jobs will disappear. This will hurt the wider industry, and the economy by extension.
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.
I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.
Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.
I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.
For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...
The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.
That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.
I think that's what not happened yet.
Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
> Progress in AI has always been a step function.
There's decisively no evidence of that, since whatever measure you use to rate "progress in AI" is bound to be entirely subjective, especially with such a broad statement.
I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.
Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...
The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.
That claim is just patently false.
Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.
Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?
Some will read this and laser in on the "socialism" part, but obviously the interesting bit is the second half of the quote.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness
This is now my favorite way of describing fleeting hype-tech.
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.
What risk?
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
You used “honest” and “businessman” in the same sentence.
Good one.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
That was soooo 2 weeks ago.
In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.
Very obviously the internet is useful, and has radically changed our lives. Also obviously, most of the high stock valuations of the ‘90s didn’t pan out.
Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
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My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.
I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?
> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).
So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.
> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?
> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.
But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/financials/
Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.
tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.
But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.
Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.
That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares
I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.
more like 40, yes
I think AI is a bubble, but there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble. Sounds like they are spending even more money per researcher.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.
If you're trying to build a bunch of Wendy's locations, it's clearly better to have more construction workers.
It's less clear that if you're trying to build SGI that you're better off with 1000 people than 10.
It might be! But it might not be, too. Who knows for certain til post-ex?
I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month.
Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it?
The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children".
You are definitely going to overrun your ETA if your target is 100 children in 9 months using only 100 women.
IOW, this is a facile comparison not worthy of consideration.[1]
> So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.
This[1] is not the type of problem where the analogy applies.
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[1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!
Your designing one thing. You're building one plant. Yes, you'll make and sell millions of widgets in the end but the system that produces them? Just one.
Engineering teams do become less efficient above some size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
You might well be making 100 AI babies, and seeing which one turns out to be the genius.
We shouldn’t assume that the best way to do research is just through careful, linear planning and design. Sometimes you need to run a hundred experiments before figuring out which one will work. Smart and well-designed experiments, yes, but brute force + decent theory can often solve problems faster than just good theory alone.
In this case, you want one foundation model, not 100 or 1000. You can’t afford to build 1000. That’s the one baby the company wants.
I am going to repeat the footnote in my comment:
>> [1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!
IOW, if you're looking for specifically for quality, you can't bet everything on one horse.
At some point, even companies like Meta need to make a limited number of bets, and in cases like that it's better to have smarter than more people.
You’re promoting vacuous vanity
Where?