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.
I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices.
Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
My favorite anecdote about Sears is from Starbucks current HQs - the HQs used to be a warehouse for Sears. Before renovation the first floor walls next to the elevators used to have Sears' "commitment to customers" (or something like that).
To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason that is not the case customers can return the purchase back to Sears and Sears will pay for the return transportation charges.
They weren't wrong. Its core business in what is still a viable-enough sector collapsed. Or if it were truly well-managed, running an ISP and a retailer should have been enough insight to be Amazon.
Or maybe not. Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead.
So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.
Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.
The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.
Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.
I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.
For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact.
The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.
That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.
I think that's what not happened yet.
Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.
That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year).
IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.
It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving.
The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
I'm starting to agree with this viewpoint. As the technology seems to solidify to roughly what we can do now, the aspirations are going to have to get cut back until there's a couple more breakthroughs.
There's also no evidence that it won't, so your opinion carries exactly the same weight as theirs.
> Progress in AI has always been a step function.
There's decisively no evidence of that, since whatever measure you use to rate "progress in AI" is bound to be entirely subjective, especially with such a broad statement.
> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do
I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.
Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
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).
The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.
This is just a cope for people who aren't successful. Most people who are successful have a massive string of failed attempts in their past, but they're good at picking themselves back up and trying again and following through when "luck" finally strikes.
This might be true for a normal definition of success, but not lottery-winner style success like Facebook. If you look at Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, the founders all have few or zero previous attempts at starting a business. My theory is that this leads them to pursue risky behavior that more experienced leaders wouldn't try, and because they were in the right place at the right time, that earned them the largest rewards.
When you are still one of the top 3 richest people in the world after your mistake, that is not a "failure" in the way normal people experience it. That is just passing the time.
This is just cope for people with a massive string of failed attempts and no successes.
Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.
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.
Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
When you put the guitar down after three months it's one thing, but when you reverse course on an entire line of development in a way that might affect hundreds or thousands of employees it's a failure of integrity.
Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst
and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders.
He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
>But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.
Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble.
They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.
I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead
I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?
It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
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.
The line was to buy Amazon as it was undervalued a la IBM or Apple based on its cloud computing capabilities relative to the future (projected) needs of AI.
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.
I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up.
My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.
I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.
Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.
With gpt5 I’m not sure this is true. Certainly openAI is still losing money but if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable.
As someone using LLMs daily, it's always interesting to read something about AI being a bubble or just hype. I think you're going to miss the train, I am personally convinced this is the technology of our lifetime.
You are welcome to share how AI has transformed a revenue generating role. Personally, I have never seen a durable example of it, despite my excitement with the tech.
In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.
What you've described is reasonable and a clear takeaway is that AI is a timesaving tool you should learn.
Where i share concern with the parent is the claims that AI is useless which isn't coming from your post at all but i have definitely seen instances of it in the programmer community still to this day. As in the parents concern that some programmers are missing the train is unfortunately completely warranted.
I know a company that replaced their sales call center with an AI calling bot instead. The bot got better sales and higher feedback scores from customers.
I'll say it again since I've said it a million times, it can be useful and a bubble. The logic of investors before the last market crash was something like "houses are useful, so no amount of hype around the housing market could be a bubble"
Or, quite similarly, the internet bubble of the large ‘90s
Very obviously the internet is useful, and has radically changed our lives. Also obviously, most of the high stock valuations of the ‘90s didn’t pan out.
If you really think this, `baby` is an apt name! Internet, Smartphones, and social media will all be more impactful than LLMs could possibly be... but hey, if you're like 18 y/o then sure, maybe LLMs is the biggest.
Also disagree with missing the train, these tools are so easy to use a monkey (not even a smart one like an ape, more like a Howler) can effectively use them. Add in that the tooling landscape is changing rapidly; ex: everyone loved Cursor, but now it's fallen behind and everyone loves Claude Code. There's some sense in waiting for this to calm down and become more open. (Why are users so OK with vendor lock-in??? It's bothersome)
The hard parts are running LLMs locally (what quant do I use? K/V quant? Tradeoffs? Llama.cpp or ollama or vllm? What model? How much context can I cram in my vram? What if I do CPU inference? Fine tuning? etc..) and creating/training them.
> It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?
> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).
So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.
> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?
> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.
But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.
The financials from the link to not specifically call out Depreciation Expense. But Operating Income should take into account Depreciation Expense.
The financials have a line below Net Income Line called "Reconciled depreciation" with about $16.7 billion. I do not know what that means (maybe this is how they get to the EBITDA metric) but maybe this is the metric you are looking for.
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.
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.
The comment I was responding to was implying that it would be better for the collective if Meta was not paying these exorbitant salaries. You said “it [paying high salaries] is a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.”
In other words, you’re suggesting that _not_ paying high salaries would be good for collective growth and development.
And if Meta is currently willing to pay these salaries, but didn’t for some reason, that would be the definition of wage suppression.
I have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.
Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.
That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares
If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.
Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.
Make a mistake once, it’s misjudgment. Repeat it, it’s incompetence?
Meta nearly doubled its headcount in 2020 and 2021, assuming the pandemic growth would continue. However, Zuckerberg later admitted this was a mistake.
Metaverse (especially) or AI might make more sense if you could actually see your friend's posts (and vice versa), if the feed made sense (which it hasn't for years now) and if you could message people who you aren't friends with yet without it getting lost in some 'other' folder you won't discover until 3 years from now (Gmail has a Spam folder problem... but the difference is you can see you have messages there and you can at least check it out for yourself)
What I'm trying to say is make your product the barest minimum usable first maybe? (Also, don't act like, as Jason Calacanis has called it, a marauder, like copying everything from everyone all the time. What he's done with Snapchat is absolutely tasteless and in the case of spying on them - which he's done - very likely criminal)
They didn't just invest they made it core to their identity with the name change and it just fell so so flat because the claims were nonsense hype for crypto pumps. We already had stuff like VR Chat (still going pretty strong) it just wasn't corporate and sanitized for sale and mass monetization.
They're still on it though. The new headset prototypes with high FOV sound amazing, and they are iterating on many designs.
They're already doing something like ~$500M/year in Meta Quest app sales. Granted not huge yet after their 30% cut, but sales should keep increasing as the headsets get better.
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.
> 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!
>> 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.
You might well be making 100 AI babies, and seeing which one turns out to be the genius.
We shouldn’t assume that the best way to do research is just through careful, linear planning and design. Sometimes you need to run a hundred experiments before figuring out which one will work. Smart and well-designed experiments, yes, but brute force + decent theory can often solve problems faster than just good theory alone.
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.
> 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.
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.
Meta's business model is to capture attention - largely with "content" - so they can charge lots of money to sprinkle ads amongst that content.
I can see a lot of utility for Meta to get deeply involved in the unlimited custom content generating machine. They have a lot of data about what sort of content gets people to spend more time with them. They now have the ability to endlessly create exactly what it is that keeps you most engaged and looking at ads.
Frankly, content businesses that get their revenue from ads are one of the most easily monetizable ways to use the outputs of AI.
Yes, it will pollute the internet to the point of making almost all information untrustable, but think of how much money can be extracted along the way!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly this - people that understood the field well enough to add new knowledge to it has to be a pretty decent signal for a research-level engineer.
At the research level it’s not just about being smart enough, or being a good programmer, or even completely understanding the field - it’s also about having an intuitive understanding of the field where you can self pursue research directions that are novel enough and yield results. Hard to prove that without having done it before.
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
> Didn't he say their goal is AGI and they will not produce any products until then.
Did he specify what AGI is? xD
> I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
I think he was probably hyping too, it's just that he appealed to a different audience. IIRC they had a really plain website, which, I think, they thought "hackers" would like.
How did he run out of money so fast? Think Zuck is one of those guys who get sucked into hype cycles and no one around him will tell him so. Even investors.
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.
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.
You could just keep having interviews yet never actually hire anyone based on the talent pool is wide but shallow. It results in the same as a freeze, but without the negative connotation to the company while shifting it to the workforce
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.
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.
> Anything to distract from actually giving good stewardship and fixing the neglect and stagnation of Meta's fundamental products like facebook and insta.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Oh, yeah — Apple Vision is a complete joke. I'm an Apple apologist to a degree though so I can rationalize all their missteps. I won't deny though they have had many though.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think we can really call the instagram purchase purely defense. They didn't buy it and then slowly kill it. They bought it and turned it into a product of comparable size to their flagship with sustained large investment.
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.
>has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company.
That has a lot to do with the fact that it's a business centric company. His acumen has been in user growth, monetization of ads, acquisitions and so on. He's very similar to Altman.
The problems start when you try to venture into hard technological topics, like the Metaverse fiasco, where you have to have a sober and engineering oriented understanding of the practical limits of technology, like Carmack who left Meta pretty frustrated. You can't just bullshit infinitely when the tech and not the sales matter.
Contrast it with Gates who had a serious programming background, he never promised even a fraction of the cringe worthy stuff you hear from some CEOs nowadays because he would have known it's nonsense. Or take Apple, infinitely more sane on the AI topic because it isn't just a "more users, more growth, stonks go up" company.
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
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
He created the company, if it is well run it was thanks to him hiring the right people. Regardless how you slice it he is a big reason it didn't fail, most companies like that fails when they scale up and hire a lot of people but facebook didn't, hiring the right people is not luck.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
> 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).
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?
You're probably going to get comments like "Social networking existed before. You can't steal it". Well, on top of derailing someone else's execution of said non-stole idea (or something) which makes you a jerk, in the case of those he 'stole'/stole from, for starters maybe it was existing code (I don't know if that was ever proven), but maybe it was also the Winklevosses idea of using .edu email addresses, and possibly other concepts
Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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.
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
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".
Personally, I think it's both! It's a bubble, but it's also going to be something that slowly but steadily transforms the world in the next 10-20 years.
Dot-com was the same way... the Internet did end up having the potential everyone thought it would, businesses just didn't handle the influx of investment well.
... people said the same thing about the "metaverse" just a few years ago. "You know people are gonna live their entire lives in there! It's gonna change everything!" And 99% of people who heard that laughed and said "what are you smoking?" And I say the same thing when I hear people talk about "the AI machine god!"
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).
“ 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 had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, it left me wondering if the main draw of "AI" is better thought of as entertainment. And whether using it for even just rough discovery actually serves as a black hole for the motivation to get things done.
I'm actually a little shocked that AI hasn't been integrated into games more deeply at this point.
Between whisper and lightweight tuned models, it wouldn't be super hard to have onboard AI models that you can interact with in much more meaningful ways that we have traditionally interacted with NPCs.
When I meet an NPC castle guard, it would be awesome if they had an LLM behind it that was instructed to not allow me to pass unless I mention my Norse heritage or whatever.
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.
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.
> 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/
Clickbait title and article. There was a large reorg of genai/msl and several other teams, so things have been shuffled around and they likely don't want to hire into the org while this is finalizing.
A freeze like this is common and basically just signals that they are ready to get to work with the current team they have. The whole point of the AI org is to be a smaller, more focused, and lean org, and they have been making several strategic hires for months at this point. All this says is that zuck thinks the org is in a good spot to start executing.
From talking with people at and outside of the company, I don't have much reason to believe that this is some kneejerk reaction to some supposed realization that "its all a bubble." I think people are conflating this with whatever Sam Altman said about a bubble.
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.
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
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...
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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!
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...
> Mark Zuckerberg has blocked recruitment of artificial intelligence staff at Meta, slamming the brakes on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree amid fears of an AI bubble.
> amid fears of an AI bubble
Who told the telegraph that these two things are related? Is it just another case of wishful thinking?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I don’t think it’s entirely a bubble. Definitely this is revolutionary technology on the scale of going to the moon. It will fundamentally change humanity.
But while the technology is revolutionary the ideas and capability behind building these things aren’t that complicated.
Paying a guy millions doesn’t mean shit. So what mark zuckerberg was doing was dumb.
Of all the examples of things that actually had an impact I would pick this one last... Steam engine, internet, personal computers, radios, GPS, &c. but going to the moon ? The thing we did a few times and stopped doing once we won the ussr vs usa dick contest ?
Impact is irrelevant. We aren’t sure about the impact of AI yet. But the technology is revolutionary. Thus for the example I picked something thats revolutionary but the impact is not as clear.
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.
> 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.
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.
It was an example. Pets.com was just the flagship (at least in my mind), but during the dot com bubble there were many many more such sites that had an inflated market value. I mean, if it was just one site that crashed then it wouldn't be called a bubble.
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."
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.
This sets up the other quote from the movie:
Michael Burry: “I may be early but I’m not wrong”. Investor guy: “It’s the same thing! It's the same thing, Mike!”
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.
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.
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
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.
The most likely explanation I can think of are drugs.
Offering 1B dollar salaries and then backtracking, it's like when that addict friend calls you with a super cool idea at 11pm and then 5 days later they regret it.
Also rejecting a 1B salary? Drugs, it isn't unheard of in Silicon Valley.
https://archive.ph/UqHo8
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.
I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices.
Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
Today I learned that Sears founded Prodigy!
Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
My favorite anecdote about Sears is from Starbucks current HQs - the HQs used to be a warehouse for Sears. Before renovation the first floor walls next to the elevators used to have Sears' "commitment to customers" (or something like that).
To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason that is not the case customers can return the purchase back to Sears and Sears will pay for the return transportation charges.
Blame short sighted investors asking Sears to "focus"
They weren't wrong. Its core business in what is still a viable-enough sector collapsed. Or if it were truly well-managed, running an ISP and a retailer should have been enough insight to be Amazon.
Newton at Apple is another great one, though they of course got there.
Or maybe not. Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead.
So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.
Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.
The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
> Netflix over DialUp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks
>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.
Speaking of Netflix -
I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.
Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.
I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.
For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact.
The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.
That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.
I think that's what not happened yet.
Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.
That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year).
IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.
I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI.
It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies
You're looking at individual generations.
The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs.
Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.
As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :)
https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal...
Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person.
It's going to be a bloodbath.
It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving.
The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
I'm starting to agree with this viewpoint. As the technology seems to solidify to roughly what we can do now, the aspirations are going to have to get cut back until there's a couple more breakthroughs.
There’s no evidence that it’ll scale like that. Progress in AI has always been a step function.
There's also no evidence that it won't, so your opinion carries exactly the same weight as theirs.
> Progress in AI has always been a step function.
There's decisively no evidence of that, since whatever measure you use to rate "progress in AI" is bound to be entirely subjective, especially with such a broad statement.
rodent -> homo sapiens brain scales just fine? It's tenuous evidence, but not zero.
Uh it’s been multiple repeated step ups in the last 15 years. The trending is up up up.
> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do
I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.
Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
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).
It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0].
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...
Luck. And capturing strong network effect.
The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.
Success happens when luck meets hard work.
Every billionaire could have died from childhood cancer.
This is just a cope for people who aren't successful. Most people who are successful have a massive string of failed attempts in their past, but they're good at picking themselves back up and trying again and following through when "luck" finally strikes.
This might be true for a normal definition of success, but not lottery-winner style success like Facebook. If you look at Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, the founders all have few or zero previous attempts at starting a business. My theory is that this leads them to pursue risky behavior that more experienced leaders wouldn't try, and because they were in the right place at the right time, that earned them the largest rewards.
Not true of Netflix, founder came from PayPal. Apple required founder to leave and learn with a bunch of other companies like Pixar and next.
What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?
They failed to not go to an Ivy League school and failed to have poor parents.
Or Gates or Buffet.
That claim is just patently false.
Alexa, Metaverse, being decent human beings
When you are still one of the top 3 richest people in the world after your mistake, that is not a "failure" in the way normal people experience it. That is just passing the time.
This is just cope for people with a massive string of failed attempts and no successes.
Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.
IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N.
Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Some will read this and laser in on the "socialism" part, but obviously the interesting bit is the second half of the quote.
That phrase explains the US Health Care System
this is also just cope
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.
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.
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.
for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?
But then we wouldn't have had that great soundtrack from Trent and Atticus
What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.
Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.
What risk?
I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness
Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
When you put the guitar down after three months it's one thing, but when you reverse course on an entire line of development in a way that might affect hundreds or thousands of employees it's a failure of integrity.
> They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
This is now my favorite way of describing fleeting hype-tech.
Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).
>luck, skill and hard work.
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
> I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded
Succeeded in making something comparable to facebook? Who are those?
When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.
You should read Careless People if this boggles your mind.
youre thinking of ordinary people by john lennon
I'm thinking of exactly what I said[^1] :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders.
He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
Ha ha.
You used “honest” and “businessman” in the same sentence.
Good one.
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.
At least the others can kinda bundle it as a service.
After spending tens of billions in AI how has it impacted a single dollar on meta's revenue?
>But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.
Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble.
They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.
I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?
It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
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.
> A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question.
Why do you assume this people know any better than average Joe on the street?
Study after study demonstrates they can't even keep up with the market benchmarks, how would they be any wiser to tell you what's a fad or not.
> record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI
That was soooo 2 weeks ago.
The line was to buy Amazon as it was undervalued a la IBM or Apple based on its cloud computing capabilities relative to the future (projected) needs of AI.
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.
I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up.
My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.
I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.
Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.
With gpt5 I’m not sure this is true. Certainly openAI is still losing money but if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable.
> if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable
For a couple of years, until someone who did keep doing research pulled ahead a bit with a similarly good UI.
As someone using LLMs daily, it's always interesting to read something about AI being a bubble or just hype. I think you're going to miss the train, I am personally convinced this is the technology of our lifetime.
You are welcome to share how AI has transformed a revenue generating role. Personally, I have never seen a durable example of it, despite my excitement with the tech.
In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.
What you've described is reasonable and a clear takeaway is that AI is a timesaving tool you should learn.
Where i share concern with the parent is the claims that AI is useless which isn't coming from your post at all but i have definitely seen instances of it in the programmer community still to this day. As in the parents concern that some programmers are missing the train is unfortunately completely warranted.
I know a company that replaced their sales call center with an AI calling bot instead. The bot got better sales and higher feedback scores from customers.
And I happen to know a different company that regrets their decision to do something similar:
https://tech.co/news/klarna-reverses-ai-overhaul
Is my anecdotal evidence any better than yours?
I know a company that did the same and lost billions of dollars
I'll say it again since I've said it a million times, it can be useful and a bubble. The logic of investors before the last market crash was something like "houses are useful, so no amount of hype around the housing market could be a bubble"
Or, quite similarly, the internet bubble of the large ‘90s
Very obviously the internet is useful, and has radically changed our lives. Also obviously, most of the high stock valuations of the ‘90s didn’t pan out.
If you really think this, `baby` is an apt name! Internet, Smartphones, and social media will all be more impactful than LLMs could possibly be... but hey, if you're like 18 y/o then sure, maybe LLMs is the biggest.
Also disagree with missing the train, these tools are so easy to use a monkey (not even a smart one like an ape, more like a Howler) can effectively use them. Add in that the tooling landscape is changing rapidly; ex: everyone loved Cursor, but now it's fallen behind and everyone loves Claude Code. There's some sense in waiting for this to calm down and become more open. (Why are users so OK with vendor lock-in??? It's bothersome)
The hard parts are running LLMs locally (what quant do I use? K/V quant? Tradeoffs? Llama.cpp or ollama or vllm? What model? How much context can I cram in my vram? What if I do CPU inference? Fine tuning? etc..) and creating/training them.
> It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?
> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).
So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.
> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?
> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.
But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.
META has only made $78.7 billion operating income in the past 12 months of returns. Time to buckle up!
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/financials/
It's really difficult to wrap one's head around the cash they're able to deploy.
An astonishing number
how does this compare to the depreciation cost of their datacenters?
The financials from the link to not specifically call out Depreciation Expense. But Operating Income should take into account Depreciation Expense.
The financials have a line below Net Income Line called "Reconciled depreciation" with about $16.7 billion. I do not know what that means (maybe this is how they get to the EBITDA metric) but maybe this is the metric you are looking for.
385 comments based on a clickbait headline from telegraph (you know that sophisticated tech focused newspaper...)
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.
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.
>I'm sure everyone is doing just fine financially
They are rich. Nobody is offered $100M+ comp if you are not already top 1% talent
The point isn't doing fine financially, it's having left multi million dollar startups as founders.
In essence, they have left stellar projects with huge money potential for the corporate rat race, albeit at important $.
Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.
Patrick Boyle on youtube has a good explanation of what's going on in the industry: https://youtu.be/3ef5IPpncsg?feature=shared
tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.
We should also say that "being really lucky is the best way to make sure that other people don't have as much luck as you do"
Its a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.
So wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?
Wage suppression? Its the opposite were talking about here. Pay large amounts of money to make sure people don't work on challenging problems.
But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.
The comment I was responding to was implying that it would be better for the collective if Meta was not paying these exorbitant salaries. You said “it [paying high salaries] is a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.”
In other words, you’re suggesting that _not_ paying high salaries would be good for collective growth and development.
And if Meta is currently willing to pay these salaries, but didn’t for some reason, that would be the definition of wage suppression.
This is the Gavin Belson strategy to starve Pied Piper of distributed computing experts; nobody get's to work on his Signature Edition Box 3!
This has never been the goal of any business, despite what they say.
I have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.
Its all in RSUs
Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.
That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares
I'm not an academic, but it kinda feels strange to me to stipulate in your contract that you must invent harder
If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.
I've heard of high 7-figure salaries but no 9 figure salaries. Source for this?
"Why Andrew Tulloch Turned Down a $1.5 Billion Offer From Mark Zuckerberg" - https://techiegamers.com/andrew-tulloch-rejects-zuckerberg/
Must feel real good to get a golden ticket out of the bubble collapse when it's this imminent.
Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.
"The New Orleans Saints have signed Taysom Hill to a record $40M contract"
Make a mistake once, it’s misjudgment. Repeat it, it’s incompetence?
Meta nearly doubled its headcount in 2020 and 2021, assuming the pandemic growth would continue. However, Zuckerberg later admitted this was a mistake.
That's a man with conviction
Sorry, I was in the metaverse just now. I took my headset off though — could you please repeat that?
Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?
You will have no genitals, and you will like it.
But genitals is like, the whole point of VR!
Yes
Metaverse (especially) or AI might make more sense if you could actually see your friend's posts (and vice versa), if the feed made sense (which it hasn't for years now) and if you could message people who you aren't friends with yet without it getting lost in some 'other' folder you won't discover until 3 years from now (Gmail has a Spam folder problem... but the difference is you can see you have messages there and you can at least check it out for yourself)
What I'm trying to say is make your product the barest minimum usable first maybe? (Also, don't act like, as Jason Calacanis has called it, a marauder, like copying everything from everyone all the time. What he's done with Snapchat is absolutely tasteless and in the case of spying on them - which he's done - very likely criminal)
Didn't Meta invest big into the Metaverse, then back track on that, was it $20 billion.
I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.
They didn't just invest they made it core to their identity with the name change and it just fell so so flat because the claims were nonsense hype for crypto pumps. We already had stuff like VR Chat (still going pretty strong) it just wasn't corporate and sanitized for sale and mass monetization.
They're still on it though. The new headset prototypes with high FOV sound amazing, and they are iterating on many designs.
They're already doing something like ~$500M/year in Meta Quest app sales. Granted not huge yet after their 30% cut, but sales should keep increasing as the headsets get better.
They spent billions on GPUs and were well positioned to enter the LLM wars
They did indeed - see their current name
> was it $20 billion
more like 40, yes
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.
Its a bit frustrating that most don't read TFA instead vent out their AI angst the first opportunity they get.
yes, because meta has no incentive to act like there's no bubble
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.
Quality over quantity.
Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
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?
> 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!
>> 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.
You'd think someone would have written a book on the subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
>> Your designing one thing.
You might well be making 100 AI babies, and seeing which one turns out to be the genius.
We shouldn’t assume that the best way to do research is just through careful, linear planning and design. Sometimes you need to run a hundred experiments before figuring out which one will work. Smart and well-designed experiments, yes, but brute force + decent theory can often solve problems faster than just good theory alone.
I dare say that size is 3. Fight me ;)
Ironically, rather than being facile the point of the comparison is to explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law to people who are clearly not familiar with it.
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.
> 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.
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.
Ah the new strategy - hire one rockstar woman who can gestate 1000 babies per year for $100 mil!
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.
One person who's figured how to make ASI is more useful than a bunch that haven't. Not sure that actually applies anywhere.
It’s me. I’ve figured it out. Who’s got the offer letter so I can start?
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.
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.
Metaverse people: “We’re so back!”
It sounds like a lot of these big companies are being managed by LLMs and vibes at this point.
> vibes
always has been
(and there's comfort in numbers, no one got fired for buying IBM, etc..)
They’d probably be doing significantly better if they were LLM-guided
Previous articles and comments were "Praise Mark for being brave enough to go all in on AI!"
Now we have this ;)
It never really made sense for Meta to get into AI, the motivations were always pretty thin and it seemed like they just wanted to ride the wave.
Isn't that what companies are supposed to do by seeing/following/setting trends in a way that increases revenue and profit for the shareholders?
Meta's business model is to capture attention - largely with "content" - so they can charge lots of money to sprinkle ads amongst that content.
I can see a lot of utility for Meta to get deeply involved in the unlimited custom content generating machine. They have a lot of data about what sort of content gets people to spend more time with them. They now have the ability to endlessly create exactly what it is that keeps you most engaged and looking at ads.
Frankly, content businesses that get their revenue from ads are one of the most easily monetizable ways to use the outputs of AI.
Yes, it will pollute the internet to the point of making almost all information untrustable, but think of how much money can be extracted along the way!
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.
Even if they do not strike gold the second time, there can still be a multitude of reasons:
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.
What good is a wealth signal without wealth?
You’re promoting vacuous vanity
Higher status, access to higher quality mates, etc.
It might even play role in getting you to US President
> promoting
Where?
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.
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.
Exactly this - people that understood the field well enough to add new knowledge to it has to be a pretty decent signal for a research-level engineer.
At the research level it’s not just about being smart enough, or being a good programmer, or even completely understanding the field - it’s also about having an intuitive understanding of the field where you can self pursue research directions that are novel enough and yield results. Hard to prove that without having done it before.
Because the innovations fail to deliver what was promised and the overall costs are higher than the outcome
How about Ilya
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
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-super...
What about him?
Right, what about him? Didn't he start his own company and raised 1 billion a while ago? I haven't heard about them since then.
Didn't he say their goal is AGI and they will not produce any products until then.
I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
> Didn't he say their goal is AGI and they will not produce any products until then.
Did he specify what AGI is? xD
> I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
I think he was probably hyping too, it's just that he appealed to a different audience. IIRC they had a really plain website, which, I think, they thought "hackers" would like.
Alexnet, AlphaGo, ChatGPT Would argue he did strike gold few times.
I don't follow him very closely. Was he important for these projects?
How did he run out of money so fast? Think Zuck is one of those guys who get sucked into hype cycles and no one around him will tell him so. Even investors.
Nvidia earnings next week. Thats the bell weather -everything else is speculation.
This seems to just be a rewrite of https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4. Can we replace the link?
This link is not paywalled, unlike the WSJ link.
It's pay wall for me.
https://archive.is/UpELz
https://archive.ph/UqHo8
Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"abundance of talent" is not something I'd ascribe to Scale.
Yeah, Scale was Amazon's Mechanical Turk for the AI era.
Better strategy of course is to quietly freeze hiring. Perhaps that is not an option for a publicly traded company though.
You could just keep having interviews yet never actually hire anyone based on the talent pool is wide but shallow. It results in the same as a freeze, but without the negative connotation to the company while shifting it to the workforce
With an employer the size of Meta people would get the clue fairly quick - with inevitable public backlash.
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.
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.
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.
occam's razor
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.
True, and after having just leaned heavy into the "metaverse" I expect they're twice shy now.
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.
> 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)!!!!
> 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.
As a DJ, I kinda want the glasses to shoot first-person video :(
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.
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.
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.
Apple has seemingly done well waiting until they see a clear consumer direction (and woefully underserved tech there).
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)
Oh, yeah — Apple Vision is a complete joke. I'm an Apple apologist to a degree though so I can rationalize all their missteps. I won't deny though they have had many though.
The most amusing has to be then Zuckerburg publishes his "thoughts" about how he's betting 100% on AI... written underneath the logo "Meta".
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
The people "gooning" over Grok's Ani apparently can't wait to take their girlfriends there. ;-)
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.
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.
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.
I don't think we can really call the instagram purchase purely defense. They didn't buy it and then slowly kill it. They bought it and turned it into a product of comparable size to their flagship with sustained large investment.
Whatsapp was also an inspired move
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.
>has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company.
That has a lot to do with the fact that it's a business centric company. His acumen has been in user growth, monetization of ads, acquisitions and so on. He's very similar to Altman.
The problems start when you try to venture into hard technological topics, like the Metaverse fiasco, where you have to have a sober and engineering oriented understanding of the practical limits of technology, like Carmack who left Meta pretty frustrated. You can't just bullshit infinitely when the tech and not the sales matter.
Contrast it with Gates who had a serious programming background, he never promised even a fraction of the cringe worthy stuff you hear from some CEOs nowadays because he would have known it's nonsense. Or take Apple, infinitely more sane on the AI topic because it isn't just a "more users, more growth, stonks go up" company.
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
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
He created the company, if it is well run it was thanks to him hiring the right people. Regardless how you slice it he is a big reason it didn't fail, most companies like that fails when they scale up and hire a lot of people but facebook didn't, hiring the right people is not luck.
hmm... Oculus Quest something something.
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.
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.
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”
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.
laughs in metaverse
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."
their core product IS 1 of 2 humans on earth.
the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
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.
They are a publicly traded company, shareholders are their bank.
What's a buyback?
You laugh, but the Oculus is amazing. I use it as part of my daily workouts.
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.
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.
To be fair, buying Instagram so early + WhatsApp were great moves too.
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.
Instagram was acquired before Onavo.
That’s true, but I remember rumors at the time that Onavo already supplied analytics to FB at the time of instagram purchase.
Google gave me a paywalled link to FTCWatch that supposedly has the details, but I can’t check.
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
Typically when a company is flush with cash, acquisitions become an obvious place to put that money.
Except a company like Google with all its billions could not compete with Facebook. o Mark did something right.
Or it's really hard to overcome network effects, no matter how good your product is.
You can do a lot of things with billion dollars and when you have the biggest email service.
> 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).
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?
I mean, there's also a reason the board hasn't ousted him.
it wasn't sheryl
Who was it then?
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.
>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?
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...
You're probably going to get comments like "Social networking existed before. You can't steal it". Well, on top of derailing someone else's execution of said non-stole idea (or something) which makes you a jerk, in the case of those he 'stole'/stole from, for starters maybe it was existing code (I don't know if that was ever proven), but maybe it was also the Winklevosses idea of using .edu email addresses, and possibly other concepts
Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
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.
You have to assume they all have each other's phone numbers, right?
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.
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.
By signing too many 250mil contracts.
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.
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.
Or enough of them! >=
Some people actually accepted the contracts before the uno reverse llamabot could activate and block them
This is Meta, named after the fact that the Metaverse is undoubtedly what comes next.
don't forget the 115th Rule of Acquisition
greed IS eternal
Because you want the ability to low-ball prospective candidates sooner rather than later.
Why are you assuming the investors are competent?
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
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.
It's an entertainment tool. Like a television or playstation. Only a fool would think social media is anything more.
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?
> 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.
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
> 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.
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".
how tf do you know when you are "finished"
So he be also read the recent article on Sam Altman saying it was a bubble?
I'm still waiting for a single proof that there was any contract in the hundreds of millions that was signed.
The damage is already done though. If I worked for Meta and did not get millions, I think I would be pretty irate.
Which is definitely why Sam Altman started this rumor.
Yes, people who struck it rich are not miraculously more intelligent or capable. Seems obvious, but many people believe they are.
Could they get their money back?
Maybe they are trying to signal to the AI talent in general to temper their expectations while simultaneously chasing rockstars with enormous sums.
I’ve never seen so much evidence for a bubble yet so much potential to be the biggest Thing ever.
Just getting a lot of mixed signals right now. Not sure what to think.
Personally, I think it's both! It's a bubble, but it's also going to be something that slowly but steadily transforms the world in the next 10-20 years.
Dot-com was the same way... the Internet did end up having the potential everyone thought it would, businesses just didn't handle the influx of investment well.
It's, like, a vision thing. You know?
https://www.threads.com/@professor_neil/post/DNiVLYptCHL/im-...
There is potential but it does seem like just throwing more money at LLMs is not going to get us to where the bubble expects
... people said the same thing about the "metaverse" just a few years ago. "You know people are gonna live their entire lives in there! It's gonna change everything!" And 99% of people who heard that laughed and said "what are you smoking?" And I say the same thing when I hear people talk about "the AI machine god!"
>> 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?
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
It just won't happen.
Every time you ask it a question you need to cool it off by pouring a bottle of water on your head.
“ 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)
"grills" are going to come back in a big way
Very few will not want to wear the glasses.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)
Last night I had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, it left me wondering if the main draw of "AI" is better thought of as entertainment. And whether using it for even just rough discovery actually serves as a black hole for the motivation to get things done.
I'm actually a little shocked that AI hasn't been integrated into games more deeply at this point.
Between whisper and lightweight tuned models, it wouldn't be super hard to have onboard AI models that you can interact with in much more meaningful ways that we have traditionally interacted with NPCs.
When I meet an NPC castle guard, it would be awesome if they had an LLM behind it that was instructed to not allow me to pass unless I mention my Norse heritage or whatever.
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.
The META rebrand was pretty brilliantly done. The makeover far outweighs this sort of sentiment for now.
Does this mean the ai companies will start charging more? I only just started figuring this AI thing out.
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.
May the enshittification begin.
Someone needs to finance absurd operational costs if the services are supposed to stick around.
Makes you think whether llama progress is not doing too well and/or perhaps we're entering a plateau for llm architecture development.
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.
> 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/
Did the board realize Zuck was out of his mind or what?
Does it matter?
Zuckerberg holds 90% of the class B supershares. There isn't much the board can do when the CEO holds most of the shareholder votes.
Clickbait title and article. There was a large reorg of genai/msl and several other teams, so things have been shuffled around and they likely don't want to hire into the org while this is finalizing.
A freeze like this is common and basically just signals that they are ready to get to work with the current team they have. The whole point of the AI org is to be a smaller, more focused, and lean org, and they have been making several strategic hires for months at this point. All this says is that zuck thinks the org is in a good spot to start executing.
From talking with people at and outside of the company, I don't have much reason to believe that this is some kneejerk reaction to some supposed realization that "its all a bubble." I think people are conflating this with whatever Sam Altman said about a bubble.
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.
That's like 8th grade math, what am misunderstanding about your comment?
E: wasn't the only one.
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
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...
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?
Compare to the speed of light, c at your two reference frames
They actually need to know so that they can train Llama.
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.
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...
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
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
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
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.
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.
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!
Wish it was more how you think than requiring boolean correct/incorrect answer on the whiteboard after 15min.
That's basic high school math problem.
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...
I don't get the joke.
no joke, stop pretending like you know the answer to every LeetCode question that utilizes Euclidean distance
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
> Mark Zuckerberg has blocked recruitment of artificial intelligence staff at Meta, slamming the brakes on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree amid fears of an AI bubble.
> amid fears of an AI bubble
Who told the telegraph that these two things are related? Is it just another case of wishful thinking?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is he always behind the curve, always?
He and his company have not innovated since they created facebook. They bought their success after that
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.
Must be nice to do whatever he wants, without worrying about consequences…
The team drew criticism from executives this spring after the release of the latest Llama models underperformed expectations.
interesting
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44968111
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.
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.
your comment somehow feels more emotionally charged and low effort than the original. here, let's continue that...
Why would that give you a nice feeling?
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 ...
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?
#comments >>> #points --> flame war detector
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.
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"
"Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring after he personally offered 250M to a single person and the budget is now gone."
Really feels like it went from "AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs forever" to "whoops bubble" in about 6 weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No worries, we’ll be back at the takeover stage in another 6 weeks
I feel like it was never a bubble to begin with. It was a hoax.
> 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...
> 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.
Now that you mention it, there's been a very sudden tone shift from both Altman and Zuckerberg. What's going on?
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.
Or now that he has the money he wants people to stop investing in the competition.
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.
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
Right, he's hoping to be Amazon rather than Pets.com in the sitcom bubble analogy.
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.
Explains why AI companies like Windsurf were hunting for buyers to hold the bag
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...
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.
all of those are basically true for every big tech company
So we agree that Meta is at minimum the equal of every big tech company?
we agree that at maximum its the equal of every tech company
In what other metrics do other big tech companies exceed it, causing them to be ranked higher?
“Man who creates bubble now fears it”
I don’t think it’s entirely a bubble. Definitely this is revolutionary technology on the scale of going to the moon. It will fundamentally change humanity.
But while the technology is revolutionary the ideas and capability behind building these things aren’t that complicated.
Paying a guy millions doesn’t mean shit. So what mark zuckerberg was doing was dumb.
> on the scale of going to the moon
Of all the examples of things that actually had an impact I would pick this one last... Steam engine, internet, personal computers, radios, GPS, &c. but going to the moon ? The thing we did a few times and stopped doing once we won the ussr vs usa dick contest ?
Impact is irrelevant. We aren’t sure about the impact of AI yet. But the technology is revolutionary. Thus for the example I picked something thats revolutionary but the impact is not as clear.
> Pays 100 million for people, wonders if theres a bubble
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You really can't compare "AI" to a single website, it makes no sense
It was an example. Pets.com was just the flagship (at least in my mind), but during the dot com bubble there were many many more such sites that had an inflated market value. I mean, if it was just one site that crashed then it wouldn't be called a bubble.
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."
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.
This sets up the other quote from the movie: Michael Burry: “I may be early but I’m not wrong”. Investor guy: “It’s the same thing! It's the same thing, Mike!”
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.
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.
Confirmation bias much?
One of the near top signals of this AI bubble.
In this hype cycle, you are in late 1999, early 2000.
It depends on your oracle. According to the Shiller PE of the S&P 500 it's only November '98! [0]
[0] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
All that's missing is an analogue to the pets.com Superbowl ad!
They should put AI into a blockchain and have a proper ICO.
you laugh, but someone actually did that and raised like $300m.
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.
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
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.
The most likely explanation I can think of are drugs.
Offering 1B dollar salaries and then backtracking, it's like when that addict friend calls you with a super cool idea at 11pm and then 5 days later they regret it.
Also rejecting a 1B salary? Drugs, it isn't unheard of in Silicon Valley.
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?
THANK YOU
... the bubble that he created? After he threw $100,000,000,000 into a VR bubble mostly of his making? What a fucking jackass manchild.
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.
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 ?
A hiring freeze is not something you do because you are planning well.
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.