> “While TBD Labs is still relatively new, we believe it has the greatest compute-per-researcher in the industry, and that will only increase,” Meta said.
Well, two ways to make that true!
baobabKoodaa · 1h ago
> Avi Verma, a former OpenAI researcher, went through Meta’s onboarding process but never showed up for his first day, according to a person familiar with the matter.
I don't get it. You voluntarily choose to leave a very highly paid job in favor of an extremely high paid job, and then you... just don't show up to work? What could possibly go so wrong between the time of signing the job contract and showing up to work on day 1?
jedberg · 1h ago
Counteroffer, or after the onboarding you realize that Meta is a huge corporation and that's just not for you.
As someone who has worked at both the biggest corps and the smallest startups (and in between), I can see how going from OpenAI to Meta could hit you like a truck after you do onboarding.
chvid · 1h ago
Just not showing up at a job which you have signed a contract for is rude and childish. Even if you are a superduper ai researcher.
jkestner · 50m ago
You know who shows up every day? An AI head of AI.
Xenoamorphous · 40m ago
Very unprofessional.
rand593843 · 4m ago
If they can fire you at will based on the business needs then the same applies for employer based on personal interests.
krackers · 1h ago
In such cases, would the person still get the signing bonus? Or are these contracts always written with some contingency that the person has to remain for a period?
Either way if a company is willing to throw money to hire you, you probably have enough leverage to get them to write a custom contract in your favor.
jedberg · 55m ago
Usually the way it works is you get signing bonus with your first paycheck, and then you have to return a prorated amount if you leave before the first year. It's possible they negotiated something better, but unlikely.
Amazon avoids this problem altogether by paying the signing bonus 1/52 with each bi-weekly paycheck for the first two years. They also do the proration on five workdays in a week when it's in their favor, but seven days in a week when it's in your favor, so they win either way.
mrcwinn · 1h ago
They would not. And most of these flashy numbers are paid in options, which typically do not begin vesting for 1 year. That bit is negotiable depending on the stock plan, but in any event, certainly no value is given to the employee on day -1 or 0.
nabla9 · 34m ago
When you are paid tens of million to work and have endless options, treating you as employer, or expecting you to implement some assholes vision and not your own is not the way forward.
Noun,
"fuck you money" (uncountable)
(US, slang, vulgar) Enough money to leave
one's job, etc. and enjoy the lifestyle
of one's choice.
bpodgursky · 1h ago
Counteroffer, obviously
alwa · 1h ago
> Meta said this allegation was “manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies.”
Was this bombastic, “nyah-nyah,” “I know you are but what am I” style of public communication a thing before the current president hired spokespeople who behave this way?
If it’s at all indicative of how things work inside that company, I’d be out the door on the first day too, no matter how many absurd millions were supposedly on offer…
chaps · 1h ago
At least in my experience when doing investigative journo stuff, it's rare but it happens. The spokespeople who've done it towards me have been around for long enough that it's not unknown behavior.
alwa · 14m ago
I mean, I guess if the all of the substantive facts are against you, it makes sense that your only move is to kick up dust this way. I just don’t see how it helps: they just come off looking desperate.
Then again I don’t use the socials, maybe that’s what I’m missing.
SonOfKyuss · 48m ago
It definitely has that petty, defensive vibe similar to the current administration as well as Elon Musk companies. Narcissistic leadership seems to be the common characteristic
kingstnap · 1h ago
Teething pains are surely expected. But the egos of some of these people have to be inflated worse than ai wrapper valuations.
energy123 · 1h ago
I hope they fail. Meta and Zuck can't be trusted after years of making the world a worse place to live.
serial_dev · 42m ago
I hear you, but would you trust Sam / OpenAI or Elon / X? Same same same.
lambdasquirrel · 20m ago
We can hope that they both fail. :o)
retnuhllort · 43m ago
Ya lets just have china do this stuff instead. /s
rand593843 · 1m ago
think in terms of openweight and what will we get benefit from.
Go deepseek.
Go llama.
Nay grok.
DougN7 · 38m ago
At this point could they do worse?
joduplessis · 46m ago
How are people still on FB or Insta? I've been absent for a few years now, but whenever I read about FB it seems worse than ever.
Frummy · 1h ago
Wow what could possibly be so bad that multiple people leave after just some days
agilob · 1h ago
When the first names were announced I read some comments on r/LocalLLaMA that they assembled a team with too many high egos and this was going to fall apart, because of general soft-skills issues.
I know nothing about the situation, but that comment was strangely specific
baobabKoodaa · 1h ago
I vaguely recall reading the same or similar comment and I thought at the time it sounds like a very likely outcome.
crazystar · 1h ago
Money can't buy culture.
chvid · 54m ago
Money also can’t buy maturity it appears.
dotcoma · 43m ago
I’d love to goof around in a dept. named “To Be Determined” for a year or three.
mturmon · 1h ago
The apparent shift in strategy/philosophy away from releasing open models seems noteworthy, and might have caused confusion/dissent.
NitpickLawyer · 56m ago
There's 0 chance they stop releasing open stuff. They are still way behind, so they have all the same incentives they had before to release models - brand recognition, devs engaged with their stack, slow down competition and so on. They will keep some models internal, or further train them on different datasets (internal?) for their own product use, but the "small" models (1-200ish B params) will be released in open weights for the foreseeable future.
xnx · 1h ago
What's the argument for Facebook pursuing AI at all? Is it mainly because they have a lot of money they don't know what to do with?
this_user · 37m ago
They want to be Google, or at least what Google used to be. But the reality is that they have only ever built and launched one successful product on their own: Facebook. Everything else is either acquired or has been a huge failure.
They probably have some talented people stashed away somewhere, but it's pretty obvious that they are completely unable to leverage that talent to produce anything worthwhile at this point. Their strategic direction has also been a mess for years, but that is easy to ignore as long as your cash cows are still printing money.
el_benhameen · 1h ago
My sense is that they know that legacy FB is no longer a growth product, the regulatory environment has been hostile to their previous strategy of buying products in new markets (instagram, whatsapp), and they know they need to come up with _something_ to stay relevant and keep growing if and when growth from those products starts to wane. I guess the regulatory environment in the US has shifted a little, but populist politics even on the right aren’t super friendly to conglomeration, and the EU has only grown more hostile to it.
bdangubic · 51m ago
you should read their earnings report carefully - it will clear up the confusion about “FB is no longer a growth product” and things like that :)
el_benhameen · 29m ago
Sure, I know that their revenue is still mind boggling. But I also think it’s pretty clear that FB blue or whatever is no longer front of mind in the zeitgeist. Things are fine now but they’re trying to figure out how to keep that going.
mullingitover · 34m ago
Remember it's not their money that they don't know what to do with, the investors are the ones with money they don't know what to do with. That's why they bet on technology stocks.
Zuckerberg and Musk have no choice but to be seen loudly investing in the latest cutting-edge technologies in order to keep their stock pumped. To fail to do this is to have the brand rot, the growth collapse, and the whole scheme come crashing to down like a house of cards.
jedberg · 50m ago
Commoditize the compliment. They know they need AI to make their products keep up with the industry. They don't want to be reliant on their competitors (Microsoft or Google) for that AI.
They also don't want their competitors to grow by selling AI, which is why they give away their models.
NitpickLawyer · 52m ago
All of their products are prime real estate for AI integration. But they need strong models that work well. L3 style but with current tool use / agentic stuff. They have "internal markets" for lots of niches. Auto store for mom&pop shops that use fb markets. Auto customer support. Auto chatbots for brands. Companions to keep people online and using their products. Flirty chatbots to bring in the new crop of users. And so on...
dotcoma · 36m ago
Their ‘metaverse’ did not work out great and they are trying something else.
JCM9 · 1h ago
The problem with trying to just throw money at a problem to hire a bunch of “top” talent and “leading visionaries” is that those egos rarely play well together under the same roof.
Culture, or the lack thereof, eats your unlimited budget for lunch. There are indeed problems that money can’t solve. That’s playing out painfully at Meta right now.
startupsfail · 23m ago
It's notable that one of the more successful AI products (GitHub Copilot) was not built with throwing the money at a problem or a large team.
It was built by a small team, in a right place of a large company. And they were periodically re-assessing if the machine learning was "there yet". And the technology itself (codex) was created by a mix of Google Research / Academia (NIPS) and OpenAI/YC attempt to connect that research with products. It wasn't done on giant budgets and compensation was at the FANG levels or below.
The side question to this article, imho, is "when will the current bubble burst?"
TrackerFF · 1h ago
Maybe Zuck’s “Just keep throwing money at it” strategy ain’t all that.
jsheard · 1h ago
What do you mean, it worked so well with his Metaverse initiative. $70 billion spent for $10 billion in revenue to date, and quarterly losses trending even worse as time goes on, you just can't argue with these results.
serial_dev · 38m ago
Honestly I’m kind of surprised they made 10B in revenue. There should be a web extension that adds a warning to every article or tweet that are by journalists trying to hype the metaverse. That stuff was so obviously going to fail.
jsheard · 31m ago
> Honestly I’m kind of surprised they made 10B in revenue.
Much of that is from the hardware, a very conservative estimate of (Quests sold by mid-2023) * (typical ~$300 MSRP) gets you to $6 billion revenue by itself. The problem is they're selling the hardware at a loss, and their attach rate is abysmal so that gamble isn't being offset by software sales. Most Quests ended up gathering dust.
Well, two ways to make that true!
I don't get it. You voluntarily choose to leave a very highly paid job in favor of an extremely high paid job, and then you... just don't show up to work? What could possibly go so wrong between the time of signing the job contract and showing up to work on day 1?
As someone who has worked at both the biggest corps and the smallest startups (and in between), I can see how going from OpenAI to Meta could hit you like a truck after you do onboarding.
Either way if a company is willing to throw money to hire you, you probably have enough leverage to get them to write a custom contract in your favor.
Amazon avoids this problem altogether by paying the signing bonus 1/52 with each bi-weekly paycheck for the first two years. They also do the proration on five workdays in a week when it's in their favor, but seven days in a week when it's in your favor, so they win either way.
These guys already have Fuck-you-money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck-you-money
Was this bombastic, “nyah-nyah,” “I know you are but what am I” style of public communication a thing before the current president hired spokespeople who behave this way?
If it’s at all indicative of how things work inside that company, I’d be out the door on the first day too, no matter how many absurd millions were supposedly on offer…
Then again I don’t use the socials, maybe that’s what I’m missing.
Go deepseek. Go llama.
Nay grok.
I know nothing about the situation, but that comment was strangely specific
They probably have some talented people stashed away somewhere, but it's pretty obvious that they are completely unable to leverage that talent to produce anything worthwhile at this point. Their strategic direction has also been a mess for years, but that is easy to ignore as long as your cash cows are still printing money.
Zuckerberg and Musk have no choice but to be seen loudly investing in the latest cutting-edge technologies in order to keep their stock pumped. To fail to do this is to have the brand rot, the growth collapse, and the whole scheme come crashing to down like a house of cards.
They also don't want their competitors to grow by selling AI, which is why they give away their models.
Culture, or the lack thereof, eats your unlimited budget for lunch. There are indeed problems that money can’t solve. That’s playing out painfully at Meta right now.
It was built by a small team, in a right place of a large company. And they were periodically re-assessing if the machine learning was "there yet". And the technology itself (codex) was created by a mix of Google Research / Academia (NIPS) and OpenAI/YC attempt to connect that research with products. It wasn't done on giant budgets and compensation was at the FANG levels or below.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067961
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45063326
Much of that is from the hardware, a very conservative estimate of (Quests sold by mid-2023) * (typical ~$300 MSRP) gets you to $6 billion revenue by itself. The problem is they're selling the hardware at a loss, and their attach rate is abysmal so that gamble isn't being offset by software sales. Most Quests ended up gathering dust.