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 · 14m 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 · 18m ago
Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.
akudha · 6m ago
Must be nice to do whatever he wants, without worrying about consequences…
scrollop · 4m ago
Makes you think whether llama progress is not doing too well and/or perhaps we're entering a plateau for llm architecture development.
nabla9 · 1h ago
Quality over quantity.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
onlyrealcuzzo · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 15m 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 · 10m ago
You'd think someone would have written a book on the subject.
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 · 29m 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 · 13m 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.
42lux · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
What good is a wealth signal without wealth?
You’re promoting vacuous vanity
andai · 18m ago
Higher status, access to higher quality mates, etc.
this_user · 1h 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.
gdbsjjdn · 10m ago
You're falling victim to the Gambler's Fallacy - it's like saying "the coin just flipped heads, so I choose tails, it's unlikely this coin flips heads twice in a row".
Realistically they have to draw from a small pool of people with expertise in the field. It is unlikely _anyone_ they hire will "strike gold", but past success doesn't make future success _less_ likely. At a minimum I would assume past success is uncorrelated with future success, and at best there's a weak positive correlation because of reputation, social factors, etc.
croes · 1h ago
Because the innovations fail to deliver what was promised and the overall costs are higher than the outcome
MichaelRazum · 2h ago
How about Ilya
empiko · 1h ago
What about him?
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
Right, what about him? Didn't he start his own company and raised 1 billion a while ago? I haven't heard about them since then.
scrollop · 5m ago
Didn't he say their goal is AGI and they will not produce any products until then.
I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
morkalork · 20m ago
Really feels like it went from "AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs forever" to "whoops bubble" in about 6 weeks.
deltarholamda · 6m ago
It'll be somewhere in between. A lot of capital will be burned, quite a few marginal jobs will be replaced, and AI will run into the wall of not enough new/good training material because all the future creators will be spoiled by using AI.
fnordlord · 5m ago
I feel like it was never a bubble to begin with. It was a hoax.
iab · 10m ago
No worries, we’ll be back at the takeover stage in another 6 weeks
EternalFury · 2m ago
Is it just me or does it feel like billionaires of that ilk can never go broke no matter how bad their decisions are?
The complete shift to the metaverse, the complete shift to LLMs and fat AI glasses, the bullheaded “let’s suck all talents out of the atmosphere” phase and now let’s freeze all hiring. In a handful of years.
And yet, billionaires will remain billionaires. As if there are no consequences for these guys.
Meanwhile I feel another bubble burst coming that will hang everyone else high and dry.
lilerjee · 7m ago
Similar to my view of AI, there is a huge bubble in current AI. Current AI is nothing more than a second-hand information processing model, with inherent cognitive biases, lagging behind environmental changes, and other limitations or shortcomings.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Nothing would give me a nicer feeling of schadenfreude than to see Meta, Google, and these other frothing-at-the-mouth AI hucksters take a bath on their bets.
Hammershaft · 13m ago
Can we try to not turn HN into this? I come to this forum to find domain experts with interesting commentary, emotionally charged low effort food fights.
Lionga · 1h ago
How did this get pushed of the front page with over 100 points in less then an hour?
YC does not like that kind of articles?
cyberlimerence · 57m ago
#comments >>> #points --> flame war detector
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
Just until some month ago, people on HN were shouting people down who argued that spending big money on building an AI might not be a good idea ...
YeGoblynQueenne · 1h ago
>> Mr Zuckerberg has said he wants to develop a “personal superintelligence” that acts as a permanent superhuman assistant and lives in smart glasses.
Yann Le Cun has spoken about this, so much that I thought it was his idea.
In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?
techpineapple · 42m ago
“ In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?”
People probably said the same thing about “what if someone doesn’t want to carry a phone with them everywhere”. If it’s useful enough the culture will change (which, I unequivocally think they won’t be, but I digress)
roxolotl · 2h ago
Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
onlyrealcuzzo · 1h ago
I really don't understand this massive flip flopping.
Do I have this timeline correct?
* January, announce massive $65B AI spend
* June, buy Scale AI for ~$15B, massive AI hiring spree, reportedly paying millions per year for low-level AI devs
* July, announce some of the biggest data centers ever that will cost billions and use all of Ohio's water (hyperbolic)
* Aug, freeze, it's a bubble!
Someone please tell me I've got it all wrong.
This looks like the Metaverse all over again!
abxyz · 1h ago
The bubble narrative is coming from the outside. More likely is that the /acquisition/ of Scale has led to an abundance of talent that is being underutilised. If you give managers the option to hire, they will. Freezing hiring while reorganising is a sane strategy regardless of how well you are or are not doing.
ml-anon · 5m ago
"abundance of talent" is not something I'd ascribe to Scale.
prasadjoglekar · 1h ago
This. TFA says this explicitly. Alexander Wang, the former Scale CEO is to approve any new hires.
They're taking stock of internal staff + new acquisitions and how to rationalize before further steps.
Now, I think AI investments are still a bubble, but that's not why FB is freezing hiring.
apwell23 · 1h ago
> They're taking stock of internal staff + new acquisitions and how to rationalize before further steps.
Like a toddler collecting random toys in a pile and then deciding what to do with them.
prasadjoglekar · 1h ago
Perhaps. But more like, there's a new boss who wants to understand the biz before doing any action. I've done this personally at a much smaller scale of course.
fartfeatures · 1h ago
Maybe they are poisoning the well to slow their competitors? Get the funding you need secured for the data centers and the hiring, hire everyone you need and then put out signals that there is another AI winter.
Andrex · 27m ago
That could eventually screw them over too if they're not careful. That also ascribes cleverness to Meta's C-suit which I don't think exists.
randycupertino · 38m ago
Zuckerberg's leadership style feels very reactionary and arrogant, defined by flailing around for the new fad and new hyped thing, scrapping everything that when the current obsession doesn't work out and then sticking head in the sand about abandoned projects and ignoring subsequent whiplash.
Remember when he pivoted the entire company to the meta-verse and it was all about avatars with no legs? And how proud they trumpeted when the avatars were "now with legs!!" but still looked so pathetic to everyone not in his bubble. Then for a while it was all about Meta glasses and he was spamming those goofy cringe glasses no one wants in all his instagram posts- seriously if you check out his insta he wears them constantly.
Then this spring/summer it was all about AI and stealing rockstar ai coders from competitors and pouring endless money into flirty chatbots for lonely seniors. Now we have some bad press from that and realizing that isn't the panacea we thought it was so we're in the the phase where this is languishing so in about 6 months we'll abandon this and roll out a new obsession that will be endlessly hyped.
Anything to distract from actually giving good stewardship and fixing the neglect and stagnation of Meta's fundamental products like facebook and insta. Wish they would just focus on increasing user functionality and enjoyment and trying to resolve the privacy issues, disinformation, ethical failures, social harm and political polarization caused by his continued poor management.
Andrex · 23m ago
> Zuckerberg's leadership style feels very reactionary and arrogant, defined by flailing around for the new fad and new hyped thing, scrapping everything that when the current obsession doesn't work out and then sticking head in the sand about abandoned projects and ignoring subsequent whiplash.
Maybe he's like this because the first few times he tried it, it worked.
Insta threatening the empire? Buy Insta, no one really complains.
Snapchat threatening Insta? Knock off their feature and put it in Insta. Snap almost died.
The first couple times Zuckerberg threw elbows he got what he wanted and no one stopped him. That probably influenced his current mindset, maybe he thinks he's God and all tech industry trends revolve around his company.
_delirium · 12m ago
I could see it if he were just coming off of those successes. But those are years ago, and his recent attempts to throw his weight around have been stuff like the Metaverse boondoggle. You'd think that might lead to some introspection, but I assume not.
ozgung · 48m ago
By Amara's Law and Gartner Hype cycle every technological breakthrough looks like a bubble. Investors and technologist should already know that. I don't know why they're acting like altcoins in 2021.
Andrex · 22m ago
1 breakthrough per 99 bubbles would make anyone cautious. The rule should be to assume a bubble is happening by default until proven otherwise by time.
boxed · 1h ago
The most amusing has to be then Zuckerburg publishes his "thoughts" about how he's betting 100% on AI... written underneath the logo "Meta".
stogot · 1h ago
Zuck’s metaverse will be populated by AI characters running in the $65b manhattan data center
The MAU metric must continue to go up, and no one will know if it’s human or NPC
steve1977 · 1h ago
IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. There’s probably a proper term for this.
UncleMeat · 1h ago
I think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me.
Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.
The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.
This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.
librasteve · 1h ago
Whatsapp was also an inspired move
MrMember · 39m ago
I hate pretty much everything about Facebook but Zuckerberg has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company. The market clearly has confidence in his leadership ability, he effectively has had sole executive control of Facebook since it started and it's done very well for like 20 years now.
stogot · 1h ago
Buying competitors is not insane or a weird business practice. He was probably advised to do so by the competent people under him
And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
UncleMeat · 3m ago
I am also not saying that zuck is a prescient genius who is more capable than other CEOs. I am just saying that it doesn't seem correct to me to say that he is "a textbook case of somebody who got lucky once."
smugma · 24m ago
If you read Internal Tech Emails (on X), you’ll see that he was the driving force behind the key acquisitions (successes as well as failures such as Snap).
arcticbull · 1h ago
He's really not. Facebook is an extremely well run organization. There's a lot to dislike about working there, and there's a lot to dislike about what they do, but you cannot deny they have been unbelievably successful at it. He really is good at his job, and part of that has been making bold bets and aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets.
onlyrealcuzzo · 50m ago
Facebook can be well run without that being due to Zuck.
There are literally books that make this argument from insider perspectives (which doesn't mean it's true, but it is possible, and does happen regularly).
A basketball team can be great even if their coach sucks.
You can't attribute everything to the person at the top.
smugma · 20m ago
That is true but in Meta’s case, it is tightly managed by him. I remember a decade ago a friend was a mid-level manager and would have exec reviews to Zuck, who could absorb information very quickly and redirect feedback to align with his product strategy.
He is a very hands CEO, not one who is relying on experts to run things for him.
In contrast, I’ve heard that Elon has a very good senior management team and they sort of know how to show him shiny things that he can say he’s very hands on about while they focus on what they need to do.
rs186 · 1h ago
hmm... Oculus Quest something something.
Esophagus4 · 1h ago
I can’t tell if you’re being tongue in cheek or not, so I’ll respond as if you mean this.
It’s easy to cherry pick a few bets that flopped for every mega tech company: Amazon has them, Google has them, remember Windows Phone? etc.
I see the failures as a feature, not a bug - the guy is one of the only founder CEOs to have ever built a $2T company (trillion with a T). I imagine part of that is being willing to make big bets.
And it also seems like no individual product failure has endangered their company’s footing at all.
While I’m not a Meta or Zuck fan myself, using a relatively small product flop as an indication a $2T tech mega corp isn’t well run seems… either myopic or disingenuous.
rs186 · 44m ago
Parent comment says "aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets" and Oculus is nothing like that.
Oculus Quest are decent products, but a complete flop compared to their investment and Zuck's vision of the metaverse. Remember they even renamed the company? You could say they're on betting on the long run, but I just don't see that happening in 5 or even 10 years.
As an owner of Quest 2 and 3, I'd love to be proven wrong though. I just don't see any evidence of this would change any time soon.
patapong · 2m ago
The VR venture can also be seen as a huge investment in hard tech and competency around issues such as location tracking and display tech for creating AI-integrated smartglasses, which many believe is the next gen AI interface. Even if the current headsets or form factor do not pay off, I think having this knowledge coud be very valuable soon.
Esophagus4 · 21m ago
I don’t think their “flops” of Oculus or Metaverse have endangered their company in any material way, judging by their stock’s performance and the absurd cash generating machine they have.
Even if they aren’t great products or just wither into nothing, I don’t think we will be see a HBS case study in 20 years saying, “Meta could have been a really successful company, but were it for their failure in these two product lines”
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
laughs in metaverse
arcticbull · 1h ago
Absolutely, not everything they do will succeed but that's okay too, right? At this point their core products are used by 1 in 2 humans on earth. They need to get people to have more kids to expand their user base. They're gonna throw shit at the wall and not everything will stick, and they'll ship stuff that's not quite done, but they do have to keep trying; I can't bring myself to call that "failure."
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
their core product IS 1 of 2 humans on earth.
the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
billy99k · 1h ago
You laugh, but the Oculus is amazing. I use it as part of my daily workouts.
rs186 · 43m ago
I agree, but that does not make Oculus a commercially successful and viable product. They are still bleeding cash on it, and VR is not going mainstream any time soon.
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
fuck oculus and lucky palmer.
I have hundreds of hours building and tinkering on the original kickstarter kit and then they sold to FB and shut down all the open source stuff.
breitling · 1h ago
To be fair, buying Instagram so early + WhatsApp were great moves too.
beagle3 · 1h ago
But they were less “skill” and more “surveillance”. He had very good usage statistics (which he shouldn’t have had) of these apps through Onavo - a popular VPN app Facebook bought for the purpose of spying on what users are doing outside Facebook.
disgruntledphd2 · 1h ago
Instagram was acquired before Onavo.
tempusalaria · 1h ago
WhatsApp is certainly worth less today than what they paid for it plus the extra funding it has required over time. Let alone producing anything close to ROI. Has lost them more money than the metaverse stuff.
Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks
sumedh · 1h ago
Except a company like Google with all its billions could not compete with Facebook. o Mark did something right.
spicyusername · 1h ago
Or it's really hard to overcome network effects, no matter how good your product is.
sumedh · 1h ago
You can do a lot of things with billion dollars and when you have the biggest email service.
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
> IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill.
It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.
Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
Esophagus4 · 55m ago
And isn’t the job of a good CEO to put the right people in the right seats? So if he found a superstar COO that took the company into the stratosphere and made them all gazillionaires…
Wouldn’t that indicate, at least a little bit, a great management move by Zuck?
apwell23 · 1h ago
it wasn't sheryl
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
Who was it then?
konart · 24m ago
>IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time
How many people also where at the right place and right time and were lucky then went bankrupt or simply never made it this high?
MagicMoonlight · 48m ago
And he didn't even come up with the idea, he stole it all. And then he stole the work from the people he started it with...
mrweasel · 33m ago
It is at least a little suspicious that one week he's hiring like crazy, then next week, right after Sam Altman states that we are in an AI bubble, Zuckerberg turns around and now fears the bubble.
Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.
bitexploder · 1h ago
Ehh. You don’t get FB to where it is by being incompetent. Maybe he is not the right leader for today. Maybe. But you have to be right way, way more often than not to create a FB and get it to where it is. To operate from where it started to where it is just isn’t an accident or Dunning-Kruger.
thrance · 1h ago
The term you're looking for is "billionaire". The amount of serendipity in these guys' lives is truly baffling, and only becomes more apparent the more you dig. It makes sense when you realize their fame is all survivorship bias. Afer all, there must be someone at the tail end of the bell curve.
baq · 2h ago
By signing too many 250mil contracts.
roxolotl · 1h ago
Well that’s the incompetent piece. Setting out to write giant historical employment contracts without a plan is not something competent people do. And seemingly it’s not that they over extended a bit either since reports claimed the time availability of the contracts was extremely limited; under 30min in some cases.
FrustratedMonky · 1h ago
Yes.
Perhaps it was this: Lets hit the market fast, scoop up all the talent we can before anybody can react, then stop.
I don't think there is anybody that would expect they would 'continue' offering 250million packages. They would need to stop eventually. They just did it fast, all at once, and now stopped.
vasco · 1h ago
Or enough of them! >=
bluelightning2k · 1h ago
Some people actually accepted the contracts before the uno reverse llamabot could activate and block them
mlinhares · 23m ago
Why are you assuming the investors are competent?
ludicrousdispla · 43m ago
Because you want the ability to low-ball prospective candidates sooner rather than later.
Lalabadie · 1h ago
This is Meta, named after the fact that the Metaverse is undoubtedly what comes next.
iLoveOncall · 24m ago
I'm still waiting for a single proof that there was any contract in the hundreds of millions that was signed.
blibble · 1h ago
don't forget the 115th Rule of Acquisition
greed IS eternal
dist-epoch · 1h ago
> How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
Easy, you finished building up a team. You can only have so many cooks.
rco8786 · 1h ago
That's not really how that works in the corporate/big tech world. It's not as though Meta set out and said "Ok we're going to hire exactly 150 AI engineers and that will be our team and then we'll immediately freeze our recruiting efforts".
apwell23 · 1h ago
how tf do you know when you are "finished"
BobbyTables2 · 1h ago
So he be also read the recent article on Sam Altman saying it was a bubble?
andrepd · 1h ago
Yes, people who struck it rich are not miraculously more intelligent or capable. Seems obvious, but many people believe they are.
zpeti · 1h ago
Maybe this time the top posters on HN should stop criticizing one of the top performing founder CEOs of the last 20 years who built an insane business, made many calls that were called stupid at the time (WhatsApp), and many that were actually stupid decisions.
Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?
If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.
Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company. Oh and please revisit your comment in these timeframes
brokencode · 1h ago
I think many people just really dislike Zuckerberg as a human being and Meta as a company. Social media has seriously damaged society in many ways.
It’s not perfectionism, it’s a desire to dunk on what you don’t like whenever the opportunity arises.
rgavuliak · 1h ago
I don't think it's about perfect predictions. It's more about going all in on Metaverse and then on AI and backtracking on both. As a manager you need to use your resources wisely, even if they're as big as what Meta has at its disposal.
The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?
piva00 · 1h ago
> Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?
> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.
> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.
It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.
Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.
zpeti · 1h ago
He’s not “being paid that much”
He’s earned almost all his money through owning part of a company that millions of shareholders think is worth trillions, and does in fact generate a lot of profits.
A committee didn’t decide Zuckerberg is paid $30bn.
And id say his work is pretty exceptional. If it wasn’t then his company wouldn’t be growing. And he’d probably be pressured into resigning as CEO
Does this mean the ai companies will start charging more? I only just started figuring this AI thing out.
lm28469 · 1h ago
They're all bleeding money so yes it's inevitable.
It's always the same thing, uber, food delivery, escooter, &c. they bait you with cheap trials and stay cheap until the investors money run out, and once you're reliant on them they jack up the prices as high as they can.
neuronic · 1h ago
Someone needs to finance absurd operational costs if the services are supposed to stick around.
frexs · 1h ago
May the enshittification begin.
code_for_monkey · 22m ago
what happened to the metaverse??? I thought we finally had legs!
Seriously why does anyone take this company seriously? Its gotta be the worst of the big tech, besides maybe anything Elon touches, and even then...
ethbr1 · 16m ago
1. They've developed and open sourced incredibly useful and cool tech
2. They have some really smart people working there
3. They're well run from a business/financial perspective, especially considering their lack of a hardware platform
4. They've survived multiple paradigm shifts, and generally picked the right bets
Among other things.
seatac76 · 1h ago
The money committed to payroll for these supposed top AI is equivalent to a mid size startup’s payroll, no wonder they had to hit pause.
ojr · 1h ago
I just did a phone screen with Meta, and the interviewer asked for Euclidean distance between two points; they definitely have some nerds in the building.
jaccola · 1h ago
People saying it is a high school maths problem! I'd like to see you provide a general method for accurately measuring the distance between two arbitrary points in space...
ojr · 1h ago
Using a heap in 10 minutes, the Euclidean distance formula was given and had to be used in the answer; maybe they thought that was the question?
rogerkirkness · 1h ago
They actually need to know so that they can train Llama.
A_D_E_P_T · 1h ago
I suppose the trick is to have an ipad running GPT-voice-mode off to the side, next to your monitor. Instruct it to answer every question it overhears. This way you'll ace all of the "humiliation ritual" questions.
ojr · 1h ago
there's a youtube channel made by a meta engineer, he said to memorize the top 75 LeetCode Meta questions and approaches. He doesn't say fluff like "recognize patterns. My interviewer was 3.88/4 GPA masters Comp Sci guy from Penn, I asked for feedback he said always be studying its useful if you want a career...
karmakurtisaani · 1h ago
That's like 8th grade math, what am misunderstanding about your comment?
E: wasn't the only one.
ojr · 1h ago
K closest points using Euclidean distance and a heap, is not 8th grade math, although any 8th grade math problem can be transformed into a difficult "adult" question. Sums are elementary, asking to find a window of prefix sums that add up to something is still addition, but a little more tricky
ojr · 1h ago
it wasn't just euclidean distance of course, it was this leetcode problem k closest points to origin https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/des..., I thought if I needed a heap I would have to implement it myself didn't know I can use a library
nijave · 1h ago
I.e. the nearest neighbor problem. Presumably seeing if the candidate gave a naive solution and was able to optimize or find a more ideal solution
ojr · 1h ago
its not a nearest neighbor problem that is incorrect, they expect candidates to have the heap solution on the first go, you have 10-15 minutes to answer, no time to optimize, cheaters get blacklisted, welcome to the new reality
esafak · 1h ago
Finding the k points closest to the origin (or any other point) is obviously the k-nearest neighbors problem. What algorithm and data structure you use does not change that.
true, I am thinking, Node and neighbors, this is a heap problem, it actually does matter what algorithm you use, I learn that the hard way today, trying to implement quickselect vs using a heap library (I didn't know you could do that) is much easier, don't make the same mistake!
dist-epoch · 1h ago
That's basic high school math problem.
andrepd · 1h ago
I don't get the joke.
nova22033 · 1h ago
The team drew criticism from executives this spring after the release of the latest Llama models underperformed expectations.
interesting
nijave · 1h ago
Title is a bit misleading. Meta freezes hiring after acquiring and hiring a ton while, somewhere else, Altman says it's a bubble.
The more obvious reason for a freeze is they just got done acquiring a ton of talent
srameshc · 1h ago
It could be that, beyond the AI bubble, there may be a broader understanding of economic conditions that Meta likely has. Corporate spending cuts often follow such insights.
mgaunard · 1h ago
as an outsider, what I find the most impressive is how long it took for people to realize this was a bubble.
Has been for a few years now.
marcyb5st · 1h ago
Note: I was too young to fully understand the dot com bubble, but I still remember a few things.
The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better. Along with these promises, CEOs also hinted at a transformative impact "comparable to Electricity or the internet itself".
Given the pace of innovation in the last few years I guess a lot of people became firm believers and once you have zealots it takes time for them to change their mind. And these people surely influence the public into thinking that we are not, in fact, in a bubble.
Additionally, the companies that went bust in early 2000s never had such lofty goals/promises to match their lofty market valuations and in lieu of that current high market valuations/investments are somewhat flying under the radar.
_heimdall · 1h ago
> The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better.
The promise is being offered, that's for sure. The product will never get there, LLMs by design will simply never be intelligent.
They seem to have been banking on the assumption that human intelligence truly is nothing more than predicting the next word based on what was just said/thought. That assumption sounds wrong on the face of it and they seem to be proving it wrong with LLMs.
jimlawruk · 1h ago
From the Big Short:
Lawrence Fields: "Actually, no one can see a bubble. That's what makes it a bubble."
Michael Burry: "That's dumb, Lawrence. There are always markers."
criley2 · 1h ago
Ah Michael Burry, the man who has predicted 18 of our last 2 bubbles. Classic broken clock being right, and in a way, perfectly validates the "no one can see a bubble" claim!
If Burry could actually see a bubble/crash, he wouldn't be wrong about them 95%+ of the time... (He actually missed the covid crash as well, which is pretty shocking considering his reputation and claims!)
Ultimately, hindsight is 20/20 and understanding whether or not "the markers" will lead to a major economic event or not is impossible, just like timing the market and picking stocks. At scale, it's impossible.
jaccola · 1h ago
I feel 18 out of 2 isn't a good enough statistic to say he is "just right twice a day".
What was the cost of the 16 missed predictions? Presumably he is up over all!
Also doesn't even tell us his false positive rate. If, just for example, there were 1 million opportunities for him to call a bubble, and he called 18 and then there were only 2, this makes him look much better at predicting bubbles.
criley2 · 1h ago
If you think that predicting economic crash every single year since 2012 and being wrong (Except for 2020, when he did not predict crash and there was one), is good data, by all means, continue to trust the Boy Who Cried Crash.
menaerus · 1h ago
Confirmation bias much?
ekianjo · 1h ago
> Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has compared hype around AI to the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century
Sam is the main one driving the hype, that's rich...
motorest · 1h ago
> Sam is the main one driving the hype, that's rich...
It's also funny that he's been accusing those who accept better job offers as mercenaries. It does sound like the statements try to modulate competition both in the AI race and in acquiring the talent driving it.
cedws · 1h ago
Now that you mention it, there's been a very sudden tone shift from both Altman and Zuckerberg. What's going on?
logicchains · 8m ago
GPT-5 was a massive disappointment to people expecting LLMs to accelerate to the singularity. Unless Google comes out with something amazing in the next Gemini, all the people betting on AI firms owning the singularity will be rethinking their bets.
dist-epoch · 1h ago
Or now that he has the money he wants people to stop investing in the competition.
bux93 · 1h ago
But then, he's purposely comparing it to the .com bubble - that bubble had some underlying merit. He could compare it to NFTs, the metaverse, the South Sea Company. It wouldn't make sense for him to say it's not a bubble when it's patently clear, so he picks his bubble.
nijave · 1h ago
Facebook, Twitter, and some others made it out of the social media bubble. Some "gig" apps survived the gig bubble. Some crypto apps survived peak crypto hype
Not everyone has to lose which he's presumably banking on
_heimdall · 1h ago
Right, he's hoping to be Amazon rather than Pets.com in the sitcom bubble analogy.
rvz · 1h ago
One of the near top signals of this AI bubble.
In this hype cycle, you are in late 1999, early 2000.
pretzellogician · 1h ago
All that's missing is an analogue to the pets.com Superbowl ad!
haute_cuisine · 1h ago
They should put AI into a blockchain and have a proper ICO.
thrown-0825 · 1h ago
you laugh, but someone actually did that and raised like $300m.
its all bullshit obviously, grift really seems like the way to go these days.
ahartmetz · 1h ago
Smart contracts sometimes fail because they are executed too literally. Fixing that needs something like judges, but automated - so AI! It will be perfect. /s
neuronic · 1h ago
Good call in this case specifically, but lord this is some kind of directionless leadership despite well thought out concerns over the true economic impact of LLMs and other generative AI tech.
Useful, amazing tech but only for specific niches and not as generalist application that will end and transform the world as we know it.
I find it refreshing to browse r/betteroffline these days after 2 years of being bombarded with grifting LinkedIn lunatics everywhere you look.
Lionga · 1h ago
How did this get pushed of the front page with over 100 points in less then an hour?
YC does not like that kind of articles?
No comments yet
battxbox · 1h ago
THANK YOU
obayesshelton · 1h ago
Hey were only get huge options / stock based on the growth of the business.
Plus they will of had a vesting schedule
Besides the point that it was mental but the dude wanted the best and was throwing money at the problem.
Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.
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.
=====================================
[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
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
Realistically they have to draw from a small pool of people with expertise in the field. It is unlikely _anyone_ they hire will "strike gold", but past success doesn't make future success _less_ likely. At a minimum I would assume past success is uncorrelated with future success, and at best there's a weak positive correlation because of reputation, social factors, etc.
I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
And yet, billionaires will remain billionaires. As if there are no consequences for these guys.
Meanwhile I feel another bubble burst coming that will hang everyone else high and dry.
Yann Le Cun has spoken about this, so much that I thought it was his idea.
In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?
People probably said the same thing about “what if someone doesn’t want to carry a phone with them everywhere”. If it’s useful enough the culture will change (which, I unequivocally think they won’t be, but I digress)
Do I have this timeline correct?
* January, announce massive $65B AI spend
* June, buy Scale AI for ~$15B, massive AI hiring spree, reportedly paying millions per year for low-level AI devs
* July, announce some of the biggest data centers ever that will cost billions and use all of Ohio's water (hyperbolic)
* Aug, freeze, it's a bubble!
Someone please tell me I've got it all wrong.
This looks like the Metaverse all over again!
They're taking stock of internal staff + new acquisitions and how to rationalize before further steps.
Now, I think AI investments are still a bubble, but that's not why FB is freezing hiring.
Like a toddler collecting random toys in a pile and then deciding what to do with them.
Remember when he pivoted the entire company to the meta-verse and it was all about avatars with no legs? And how proud they trumpeted when the avatars were "now with legs!!" but still looked so pathetic to everyone not in his bubble. Then for a while it was all about Meta glasses and he was spamming those goofy cringe glasses no one wants in all his instagram posts- seriously if you check out his insta he wears them constantly.
Then this spring/summer it was all about AI and stealing rockstar ai coders from competitors and pouring endless money into flirty chatbots for lonely seniors. Now we have some bad press from that and realizing that isn't the panacea we thought it was so we're in the the phase where this is languishing so in about 6 months we'll abandon this and roll out a new obsession that will be endlessly hyped.
Anything to distract from actually giving good stewardship and fixing the neglect and stagnation of Meta's fundamental products like facebook and insta. Wish they would just focus on increasing user functionality and enjoyment and trying to resolve the privacy issues, disinformation, ethical failures, social harm and political polarization caused by his continued poor management.
Maybe he's like this because the first few times he tried it, it worked.
Insta threatening the empire? Buy Insta, no one really complains.
Snapchat threatening Insta? Knock off their feature and put it in Insta. Snap almost died.
The first couple times Zuckerberg threw elbows he got what he wanted and no one stopped him. That probably influenced his current mindset, maybe he thinks he's God and all tech industry trends revolve around his company.
The MAU metric must continue to go up, and no one will know if it’s human or NPC
Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.
The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.
This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.
And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
There are literally books that make this argument from insider perspectives (which doesn't mean it's true, but it is possible, and does happen regularly).
A basketball team can be great even if their coach sucks.
You can't attribute everything to the person at the top.
He is a very hands CEO, not one who is relying on experts to run things for him.
In contrast, I’ve heard that Elon has a very good senior management team and they sort of know how to show him shiny things that he can say he’s very hands on about while they focus on what they need to do.
It’s easy to cherry pick a few bets that flopped for every mega tech company: Amazon has them, Google has them, remember Windows Phone? etc.
I see the failures as a feature, not a bug - the guy is one of the only founder CEOs to have ever built a $2T company (trillion with a T). I imagine part of that is being willing to make big bets.
And it also seems like no individual product failure has endangered their company’s footing at all.
While I’m not a Meta or Zuck fan myself, using a relatively small product flop as an indication a $2T tech mega corp isn’t well run seems… either myopic or disingenuous.
Oculus Quest are decent products, but a complete flop compared to their investment and Zuck's vision of the metaverse. Remember they even renamed the company? You could say they're on betting on the long run, but I just don't see that happening in 5 or even 10 years.
As an owner of Quest 2 and 3, I'd love to be proven wrong though. I just don't see any evidence of this would change any time soon.
Even if they aren’t great products or just wither into nothing, I don’t think we will be see a HBS case study in 20 years saying, “Meta could have been a really successful company, but were it for their failure in these two product lines”
the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
I have hundreds of hours building and tinkering on the original kickstarter kit and then they sold to FB and shut down all the open source stuff.
Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks
It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.
Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
Wouldn’t that indicate, at least a little bit, a great management move by Zuck?
How many people also where at the right place and right time and were lucky then went bankrupt or simply never made it this high?
Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.
Perhaps it was this: Lets hit the market fast, scoop up all the talent we can before anybody can react, then stop.
I don't think there is anybody that would expect they would 'continue' offering 250million packages. They would need to stop eventually. They just did it fast, all at once, and now stopped.
greed IS eternal
Easy, you finished building up a team. You can only have so many cooks.
Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?
If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.
Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company. Oh and please revisit your comment in these timeframes
It’s not perfectionism, it’s a desire to dunk on what you don’t like whenever the opportunity arises.
The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?
> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.
> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.
It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.
Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.
He’s earned almost all his money through owning part of a company that millions of shareholders think is worth trillions, and does in fact generate a lot of profits.
A committee didn’t decide Zuckerberg is paid $30bn.
And id say his work is pretty exceptional. If it wasn’t then his company wouldn’t be growing. And he’d probably be pressured into resigning as CEO
It's always the same thing, uber, food delivery, escooter, &c. they bait you with cheap trials and stay cheap until the investors money run out, and once you're reliant on them they jack up the prices as high as they can.
Seriously why does anyone take this company seriously? Its gotta be the worst of the big tech, besides maybe anything Elon touches, and even then...
2. They have some really smart people working there
3. They're well run from a business/financial perspective, especially considering their lack of a hardware platform
4. They've survived multiple paradigm shifts, and generally picked the right bets
Among other things.
E: wasn't the only one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest_neighbor_search
interesting
The more obvious reason for a freeze is they just got done acquiring a ton of talent
Has been for a few years now.
The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better. Along with these promises, CEOs also hinted at a transformative impact "comparable to Electricity or the internet itself".
Given the pace of innovation in the last few years I guess a lot of people became firm believers and once you have zealots it takes time for them to change their mind. And these people surely influence the public into thinking that we are not, in fact, in a bubble.
Additionally, the companies that went bust in early 2000s never had such lofty goals/promises to match their lofty market valuations and in lieu of that current high market valuations/investments are somewhat flying under the radar.
The promise is being offered, that's for sure. The product will never get there, LLMs by design will simply never be intelligent.
They seem to have been banking on the assumption that human intelligence truly is nothing more than predicting the next word based on what was just said/thought. That assumption sounds wrong on the face of it and they seem to be proving it wrong with LLMs.
If Burry could actually see a bubble/crash, he wouldn't be wrong about them 95%+ of the time... (He actually missed the covid crash as well, which is pretty shocking considering his reputation and claims!)
Ultimately, hindsight is 20/20 and understanding whether or not "the markers" will lead to a major economic event or not is impossible, just like timing the market and picking stocks. At scale, it's impossible.
What was the cost of the 16 missed predictions? Presumably he is up over all!
Also doesn't even tell us his false positive rate. If, just for example, there were 1 million opportunities for him to call a bubble, and he called 18 and then there were only 2, this makes him look much better at predicting bubbles.
Sam is the main one driving the hype, that's rich...
It's also funny that he's been accusing those who accept better job offers as mercenaries. It does sound like the statements try to modulate competition both in the AI race and in acquiring the talent driving it.
Not everyone has to lose which he's presumably banking on
In this hype cycle, you are in late 1999, early 2000.
https://0g.ai/blog/0g-ecosystem-receives-290m-in-financing-t...
its all bullshit obviously, grift really seems like the way to go these days.
Useful, amazing tech but only for specific niches and not as generalist application that will end and transform the world as we know it.
I find it refreshing to browse r/betteroffline these days after 2 years of being bombarded with grifting LinkedIn lunatics everywhere you look.
YC does not like that kind of articles?
No comments yet
Plus they will of had a vesting schedule
Besides the point that it was mental but the dude wanted the best and was throwing money at the problem.