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.
torginus · 30m 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).
saubeidl · 18m 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.
jocaal · 18m 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.
vovavili · 10m 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 · 23s 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.
mrits · 32m 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 · 2m ago
[delayed]
Hilift · 34m ago
META has only made $78.7 billion operating income in the past 12 months of returns. Time to buckle up!
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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.
Must feel real good to get a golden ticket out of the bubble collapse when it's this imminent.
seydor · 57m ago
That's a man with conviction
JKCalhoun · 22m ago
Sorry, I was in the metaverse just now. I took my headset off though — could you please repeat that?
loloquwowndueo · 8m ago
Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?
adastra22 · 49s ago
You will have no genitals, and you will like it.
rudedogg · 39m ago
Metaverse people: “We’re so back!”
byyoung3 · 46m 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 · 41m ago
yes, because meta has no incentive to act like there's no bubble
Capricorn2481 · 10m 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.
nabla9 · 2h ago
Quality over quantity.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
onlyrealcuzzo · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 42m 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 · 34m 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.
butlike · 55m 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 · 30m 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.
ideamotor · 54m ago
It sounds like a lot of these big companies are being managed by LLMs and vibes at this point.
pas · 53m ago
> vibes
always has been
(and there's comfort in numbers, no one got fired for buying IBM, etc..)
blueboo · 32m ago
They’d probably be doing significantly better if they were LLM-guided
42lux · 3h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
What good is a wealth signal without wealth?
You’re promoting vacuous vanity
cma · 17s ago
Where?
andai · 1h ago
Higher status, access to higher quality mates, etc.
cma · 42m ago
It might even play role in getting you to US President
gdbsjjdn · 1h 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.
this_user · 2h 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.
croes · 2h 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
Agraillo · 6m ago
Reworded from [1]: Earlier this year Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence. Sutskever rebuffed Meta’s efforts, as well as the company’s attempt to hire him
Makes you think whether llama progress is not doing too well and/or perhaps we're entering a plateau for llm architecture development.
butlike · 52m ago
The article got me thinking that there's some sort of bottle neck that makes scaling astronomical or the value just not really there.
1. Buy up top talent from other's working in this space
2. See what they produce over say, 6mo. to a year
3. Hire a corpus of regular ICs to see what _they_ produce
4. Open source the model to see if any programmer at all can produce something novel with a pretty robust model.
Observe that nothing amazing has really come out (besides a pattern-recognizing machine that placates the user to coerce them into using more tokens for more prompts), and potentially call it on hiring for a bubble.
aleph_minus_one · 19m ago
> Observe that nothing amazing has really come out
I wouldn't say so. The problem is rather that some actually successful applications of such AI models are not what companies like Meta want to be associated with. Think into directions like AI boyfriend/girlfriend (a very active scene, and common usage of locally hosted LLMs), or roleplaying (in a very broad sense). For such applications, it matters a lot less if in some boundary cases the LLM produces strange results.
If you want to get an impression of such scenes, google "character.ai" (roleplaying), or for AI boyfriend/girlfriend have a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
roxolotl · 3h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
prasadjoglekar · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
JKCalhoun · 19m ago
Better strategy of course is to quietly freeze hiring. Perhaps that is not an option for a publicly traded company though.
ml-anon · 1h ago
"abundance of talent" is not something I'd ascribe to Scale.
torginus · 22m ago
Yeah, Scale was Amazon's Mechanical Turk for the AI era.
yifanl · 15m ago
The bubble narrative has been ongoing for a while, but as I understand it, the extremely disappointing response to GPT-5 has spilled things over.
fartfeatures · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
butlike · 44m ago
The scale they operate at makes the billions, bucks.
As a board member, I'd rather see a billion-dollar bubble test than a trillion-dollar mistake.
JKCalhoun · 17m ago
True, and after having just leaned heavy into the "metaverse" I expect they're twice shy now.
randycupertino · 1h 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.
butlike · 41m ago
> Anything to distract from actually giving good stewardship and fixing the neglect and stagnation of Meta's fundamental products like facebook and insta.
DONT TOUCH THE MONEY-MAKER(S)!!!!
butlike · 42m ago
As a DJ, I kinda want the glasses to shoot first-person video :(
Andrex · 1h 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.
No comments yet
ozgung · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
butlike · 39m ago
That's actually how you create a death spiral for your company. You have to assume 'growth' and not 'death'. 'life' over 'lost'. 'flourishing' over 'withering'. That you're strong enough to survive.
JKCalhoun · 13m ago
Apple has seemingly done well waiting until they see a clear consumer direction (and woefully underserved tech there).
butlike · 45s ago
That's not playing into a bubble, that's creating a product for a market. You could also argue the Apple Vision is a misplay, or at least premature.
They've also arrogantly gone against consumer direction time and time again (PowerPC, Lightning Ports, no headphone jack, no replaceable battery, etc.)
And finally, sometimes their vision simply doesn't shake out (AirPower)
boxed · 2h 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 · 2h 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
JKCalhoun · 12m ago
The people "gooning" over Grok's Ani apparently can't wait to take their girlfriends there. ;-)
steve1977 · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
alpha_squared · 6m ago
No one else is adding the context of where things were at the time in tech...
> 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.
Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.
Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.
librasteve · 2h ago
Whatsapp was also an inspired move
MrMember · 1h 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 · 2h 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
smugma · 1h 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).
UncleMeat · 1h 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."
arcticbull · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 2h ago
hmm... Oculus Quest something something.
Esophagus4 · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 59m 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 · 1h 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 · 2h ago
laughs in metaverse
arcticbull · 2h 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 · 2h ago
their core product IS 1 of 2 humans on earth.
the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
butlike · 36m ago
So you're saying the ad revenue sort of allows them to "be their own bank?"
Then they can bankroll their own new entrepreneurial ideas risk-free, essentially.
billy99k · 2h ago
You laugh, but the Oculus is amazing. I use it as part of my daily workouts.
rs186 · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
To be fair, buying Instagram so early + WhatsApp were great moves too.
JKCalhoun · 5m ago
Typically when a company is flush with cash, acquisitions become an obvious place to put that money.
beagle3 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Instagram was acquired before Onavo.
tempusalaria · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Except a company like Google with all its billions could not compete with Facebook. o Mark did something right.
spicyusername · 2h ago
Or it's really hard to overcome network effects, no matter how good your product is.
sumedh · 2h ago
You can do a lot of things with billion dollars and when you have the biggest email service.
aleph_minus_one · 2h 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 · 1h 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?
butlike · 34m ago
I mean, there's also a reason the board hasn't ousted him.
apwell23 · 2h ago
it wasn't sheryl
aleph_minus_one · 2h ago
Who was it then?
butlike · 33m ago
It was YOU! As an IC, remember: you're one of the most valuable assets at Meta! Without you, we couldn't build cool products like...
etc. etc.
konart · 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
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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
butlike · 32m ago
You have to assume they all have each other's phone numbers, right?
bitexploder · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 3h ago
By signing too many 250mil contracts.
roxolotl · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Or enough of them! >=
bluelightning2k · 2h ago
Some people actually accepted the contracts before the uno reverse llamabot could activate and block them
Lalabadie · 2h ago
This is Meta, named after the fact that the Metaverse is undoubtedly what comes next.
ludicrousdispla · 1h ago
Because you want the ability to low-ball prospective candidates sooner rather than later.
mlinhares · 1h ago
Why are you assuming the investors are competent?
blibble · 2h ago
don't forget the 115th Rule of Acquisition
greed IS eternal
iLoveOncall · 1h ago
I'm still waiting for a single proof that there was any contract in the hundreds of millions that was signed.
dist-epoch · 2h 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 · 2h ago
how tf do you know when you are "finished"
BobbyTables2 · 2h ago
So he be also read the recent article on Sam Altman saying it was a bubble?
andrepd · 2h ago
Yes, people who struck it rich are not miraculously more intelligent or capable. Seems obvious, but many people believe they are.
zpeti · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
butlike · 21m ago
It's an entertainment tool. Like a television or playstation. Only a fool would think social media is anything more.
rgavuliak · 2h 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 · 2h 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
deadbabe · 2h ago
Could they get their money back?
YeGoblynQueenne · 2h 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?
butlike · 46m ago
I don't want to come across as a shill, but I think superintelligence is being used here because the end result is murky and ill-defined at this point.
I think the concept is like: "a tool that has the utility of a 'personal assistant' so much so that you wouldn't have to hire one of those." (Not so much that the "superintelligence" will mimicry a human personal assistant).
Obviously this is just a guess though
lionkor · 54m ago
It just won't happen.
righthand · 55m ago
Every time you ask it a question you need to cool it off by pouring a bottle of water on your head.
techpineapple · 1h 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)
Last night I actually had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, that it left me wondering if the draw of "AI" even for rough discovery is akin to mere entertainment, and really serves as a black hole for motivation to actually get things done.
butlike · 45m ago
"grills" are going to come back in a big way
saubeidl · 52m ago
I think Mr Zuckerberg greatly underestimates how toxic his brand is. No way I want to become a borg for the "they just trust me, dumb fucks" guy.
adithyassekhar · 2h ago
Does this mean the ai companies will start charging more? I only just started figuring this AI thing out.
lm28469 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Someone needs to finance absurd operational costs if the services are supposed to stick around.
frexs · 2h ago
May the enshittification begin.
nashashmi · 28m ago
Mark created the bubble. Other investors saw few opportunities for investment. So they put more Money into a few companies.
What we need is more independent and driven innovation.
Right right now the greatest obstacle to independent innovation is the massive data bank the bigger companies have.
lilerjee · 1h 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.
ojr · 2h 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 · 2h 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...
butlike · 19m ago
Compare to the speed of light, c at your two reference frames
ojr · 2h 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 · 2h ago
They actually need to know so that they can train Llama.
A_D_E_P_T · 2h 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 · 2h ago
That's like 8th grade math, what am misunderstanding about your comment?
E: wasn't the only one.
ojr · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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
butlike · 5m ago
Wish it was more how you think than requiring boolean correct/incorrect answer on the whiteboard after 15min.
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.
edit: If you want to use a heap, the general solution is to define an appropriate cost function; e.g., the p-norm distance to a reference point. Use a union type with the distance (for the heap's comparisons) and the point itself.
ojr · 1h ago
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 · 2h ago
That's basic high school math problem.
ojr · 32m ago
The foundation, like every LeetCode problem, is a basic high school math problem, when the foundation of the problem is trigonometry, way harder than stack, arrays, linked list, bfs, dfs...
andrepd · 2h ago
I don't get the joke.
ojr · 31m ago
no joke, stop pretending like you know the answer to every LeetCode question that utilizes Euclidean distance
saubeidl · 53m ago
LLMs are not the way to AGI and it's becoming clearer to even the most fanatic evangelists. It's not without reason GPT-5 was only a minor incremental update. I am convinced we have reached peak LLM.
There's no way a system of statistical predictions by itself can ever develop anything close to reasoning or intelligence. I think maybe there might be some potential there if we combined LLMs with formal reasoning systems - make the LLM nothing more than a fancy human language <-> formal logic translator, but even then, that translation layer will be inherently unreliable due to the nature of LLMs.
butlike · 50m ago
Yup. I agree with you.
We're finally reaching the point where it's cost-prohibitive to sweep this fact under the rug with scaling out data centers and refreshing version numbers to clear contexts.
trumbitta2 · 28m ago
"Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring after he personally offered 250M to a single person and the budget is now gone."
morkalork · 1h ago
Really feels like it went from "AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs forever" to "whoops bubble" in about 6 weeks.
deltarholamda · 1h 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.
rchaud · 16m ago
Makes sense. Previously the hype was so all-encompassing that CEOs could simply rely on an implicit public perception that it was coming for our jerbs. Once they have to start explicitly saying that line themselves, it's because that perception is fading.
moduspol · 21m ago
Even that came after "AI is going to make itself smarter so fast that it's inevitably going to kill us all and must be regulated" talk ended. Remember when that was the big issue?
Haven't heard about that in a while.
morkalork · 13m ago
I've seen a few people convince themselves they were building AGI trying to do that, though it looked more like the psychotic ramblings of someone entering a manic episode committed to github. And so far none of their pet projects have taken over the world yet.
It's actually kind of reminds me of all those people who snap thinking they've solved P=NP and start spamming their "proofs" everywhere.
iab · 1h ago
No worries, we’ll be back at the takeover stage in another 6 weeks
fnordlord · 1h ago
I feel like it was never a bubble to begin with. It was a hoax.
akudha · 1h ago
Must be nice to do whatever he wants, without worrying about consequences…
SoftTalker · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Can we try to not turn HN into this? I come to this forum to find domain experts with interesting commentary, instead of emotionally charged low effort food fights.
Lionga · 2h 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 · 1h ago
#comments >>> #points --> flame war detector
aleph_minus_one · 2h 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 ...
EternalFury · 59m 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.
pas · 54m ago
the top100 richest people on the globe can do a lot more stupid stuff and still walk away to a comfortable retirement, whereas the bottom 10-20-.. percent doesn't have this luxury.
not to mention that these rich guys are playing with the money of even richer companies with waaay too much "free cash flow"
seatac76 · 2h 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.
nijave · 2h 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
nova22033 · 2h ago
The team drew criticism from executives this spring after the release of the latest Llama models underperformed expectations.
interesting
code_for_monkey · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
code_for_monkey · 29m ago
all of those are basically true for every big tech company
ethbr1 · 8m ago
So we agree that Meta is at minimum the equal of every big tech company?
srameshc · 2h 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.
charliebwrites · 51m ago
“Man who creates bubble now fears it”
ekianjo · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Now that you mention it, there's been a very sudden tone shift from both Altman and Zuckerberg. What's going on?
logicchains · 1h 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 · 2h ago
Or now that he has the money he wants people to stop investing in the competition.
bux93 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Right, he's hoping to be Amazon rather than Pets.com in the sitcom bubble analogy.
mgaunard · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
marcyb5st · 33m ago
I agree with you fully.
However, even friends/colleagues that like me are in the AI field (I am more into the "ML" side of things) always mention that while it is true that predicting the next token is a poor approximation of intelligence, emergent behaviors can't be discounted. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that, but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.
iphone_elegance · 30m ago
You really can't compare "AI" to a single website, it makes no sense
jimlawruk · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Confirmation bias much?
rvz · 2h ago
One of the near top signals of this AI bubble.
In this hype cycle, you are in late 1999, early 2000.
pretzellogician · 2h ago
All that's missing is an analogue to the pets.com Superbowl ad!
haute_cuisine · 2h ago
They should put AI into a blockchain and have a proper ICO.
thrown-0825 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
THANK YOU
obayesshelton · 2h 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.
nabla9 · 48m ago
BTW: Meta specially denies that the reason is bubble fears and they provide alternate explanation in the article.
Better title:
Meta freezes AI hiring due to some basic organizational reasons.
4gotunameagain · 44m ago
They would deny bubble fears even if leaked emails proved that it was the only thing they talked about.
Would anyone seriously take Meta's or any megacorps statements on face value ?
skywhopper · 44m ago
A hiring freeze is not something you do because you are planning well.
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.
There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
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.
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.
=====================================
[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.
always has been
(and there's comfort in numbers, no one got fired for buying IBM, etc..)
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.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-super...
I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
1. Buy up top talent from other's working in this space
2. See what they produce over say, 6mo. to a year
3. Hire a corpus of regular ICs to see what _they_ produce
4. Open source the model to see if any programmer at all can produce something novel with a pretty robust model.
Observe that nothing amazing has really come out (besides a pattern-recognizing machine that placates the user to coerce them into using more tokens for more prompts), and potentially call it on hiring for a bubble.
I wouldn't say so. The problem is rather that some actually successful applications of such AI models are not what companies like Meta want to be associated with. Think into directions like AI boyfriend/girlfriend (a very active scene, and common usage of locally hosted LLMs), or roleplaying (in a very broad sense). For such applications, it matters a lot less if in some boundary cases the LLM produces strange results.
If you want to get an impression of such scenes, google "character.ai" (roleplaying), or for AI boyfriend/girlfriend have a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
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.
As a board member, I'd rather see a billion-dollar bubble test than a trillion-dollar mistake.
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.
DONT TOUCH THE MONEY-MAKER(S)!!!!
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.
No comments yet
They've also arrogantly gone against consumer direction time and time again (PowerPC, Lightning Ports, no headphone jack, no replaceable battery, etc.)
And finally, sometimes their vision simply doesn't shake out (AirPower)
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.
> 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.
Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.
Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.
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.
Then they can bankroll their own new entrepreneurial ideas risk-free, essentially.
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?
etc. etc.
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
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?
I think the concept is like: "a tool that has the utility of a 'personal assistant' so much so that you wouldn't have to hire one of those." (Not so much that the "superintelligence" will mimicry a human personal assistant).
Obviously this is just a guess though
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)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)
Last night I actually had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, that it left me wondering if the draw of "AI" even for rough discovery is akin to mere entertainment, and really serves as a black hole for motivation to actually get things done.
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.
What we need is more independent and driven innovation.
Right right now the greatest obstacle to independent innovation is the massive data bank the bigger companies have.
E: wasn't the only one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest_neighbor_search
edit: If you want to use a heap, the general solution is to define an appropriate cost function; e.g., the p-norm distance to a reference point. Use a union type with the distance (for the heap's comparisons) and the point itself.
There's no way a system of statistical predictions by itself can ever develop anything close to reasoning or intelligence. I think maybe there might be some potential there if we combined LLMs with formal reasoning systems - make the LLM nothing more than a fancy human language <-> formal logic translator, but even then, that translation layer will be inherently unreliable due to the nature of LLMs.
We're finally reaching the point where it's cost-prohibitive to sweep this fact under the rug with scaling out data centers and refreshing version numbers to clear contexts.
Haven't heard about that in a while.
It's actually kind of reminds me of all those people who snap thinking they've solved P=NP and start spamming their "proofs" everywhere.
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.
not to mention that these rich guys are playing with the money of even richer companies with waaay too much "free cash flow"
The more obvious reason for a freeze is they just got done acquiring a ton of talent
interesting
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.
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
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.
However, even friends/colleagues that like me are in the AI field (I am more into the "ML" side of things) always mention that while it is true that predicting the next token is a poor approximation of intelligence, emergent behaviors can't be discounted. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that, but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.
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.
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?
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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.
Better title:
Meta freezes AI hiring due to some basic organizational reasons.
Would anyone seriously take Meta's or any megacorps statements on face value ?