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Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#51

Post by nemothekid »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #35
nemothekid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobi…

Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity

>Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO

Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#52

Post by nemothekid »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #23
nemothekid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobi…

You make interesting points so let's take a more nuanced view of things: I'll agree Zuck is amazing at spotting large macro trends in technology and capitalizing on them (VR he was a little early at, but I still buy it could be big). However, he wasn't able to do that with AI, the big companies and startups weren't selling. So the question is, can he build a team? I'm skeptical, he put Alexandr Wang, someone who neve…

It's far too early to call anything with "AI" - and I will be unsurprised if we enter another AI Winter as LLMs turn into a dead end.

If GPT-6, 7 and 8 continue to see diminishing returns on performance as we say from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5, then I see it becoming a winner take all of OpenAI.

What I think is ignored is how at the time, all the investors were singing Meta's doom due to Apple retiring IDFA and META's stock was crashing. Then it comes out that Meta had spent that last year buying a ton of GPUs just before the GPU supply crunch and the stock completely rebounds. Zuckerburg seems incapable of being caught with his pants down.

All the recent talk of Zuckerberg reeks of recency bias. He could completely screw up AI and he'd still be head and shoulders above every other founder/CEO.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#53

Post by nemothekid »

tejohnso wrote: post #39
SamvitJ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products." Spot on.

The best performing founder / ceo in the 21st century is someone who is unlikable and promotes / develops unlikable products. That seems impossible. What does that say about us? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the products being promoted are actually highly treasured by a large number of people.

Key word "performing". If you want feel warm feelings about your heroes, don't make your heros CEOs who are ultimately judged on how large of a return they can give their shareholders.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#54

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

nemothekid wrote: post #51
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity

> Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.

You must be kidding. Telsa isn't impressive? The first real EV manufacturer? Going from nothing to the best selling car on the planet in 20 years? Not impressive. One of only 11 companies in the world. With a trillion dollar valuation. More than tripling revenue from 2020 to 2024?

Not impressive... You have some pretty astronomical standards.

I do agree about Facebook and Facebook not being in the same tier. Space X was a far harder company to build.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#55

Post by nemothekid »

afavour wrote: post #27
nemothekid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobi…

> go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at…

>That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile.

I think most of us in the valley were already starting see mobile explode, it seemed obvious, but I think there were 2 things that really obstructed Facebook's "pivot" into mobile.

1. Facebook went public in 2012 with a very strange voting structure

2. While mobile was growing, the sentiment was that mobile could not be monetized as an ad platform.

As I remember it - the investor sentiment (and I mean broader wallstreet, not necessarily VCs), was that facebook was burning money in mobile and zuckerberg was abusing his power chasing it. While you can argue Facebook was late - I think it's only obvious in hindsight that Zuckerberg, a first time, 28yo founder, did the right thing in ignoring the noise and betting on mobile.

Furthermore I think calling Instagram a hail mary is reductive. When it comes to advertising, only Google and Facebook really cracked the code on making mobile ads profitable. No other social network comes close, and almost all the other ad networks have shuttered. Instagram had a 100 million users, thats fine, but so did Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit and none of them have an ARPU like Facebook. You could make the argument that FB made Instagram, instead of the other way around.

Had Facebook been a bit more established in 2012, maybe gone public 2 years earlier, maybe they would have their own Phone OS.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#56

Post by nemothekid »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #54
nemothekid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.

You must be kidding. Telsa isn't impressive? The first real EV manufacturer? Going from nothing to the best selling car on the planet in 20 years? Not impressive. One of only 11 companies in the world. With a trillion dollar valuation. More than tripling revenue from 2020 to 2024? Not impressive... You have some pretty astronomical standards. I do agree about Facebook and Facebook not being in the same tier. Space X…

__FOUNDER__/CEO. Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He invested in 2004, then became CEO in 2008.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#57

Post by dmonitor »

nomel wrote: post #44
bgwalter wrote: post #20

$72 billion per year to create yet another chatbot. Imagine if this were spent on useful research or housing.

I don't think that's fair. It's R&D for a potential infinite money/effort hack. Unless you're in the camp that thinks only meat can be intelligent, depending on your perspective, it can be considered somewhere between useful research and critical research, including for the pursuit of things like "housing". Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's…

So what's the goal? Summon a god?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#58

Post by afavour »

Nevermark wrote: post #46
haar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which are those 7 companies?

What companies did Elon Musk start? [0] [0] https://kagi.com/search?q=What+companies+did+Elon+Musk+start...

Unsurprisingly the AI agent is wrong. For one, Musk did not start Tesla.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#59

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

afavour wrote: post #58
Nevermark wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What companies did Elon Musk start? [0] [0] https://kagi.com/search?q=What+companies+did+Elon+Musk+start...

Unsurprisingly the AI agent is wrong. For one, Musk did not start Tesla.

Okay... When he joined it was what 7 months old, had no product at all, they didn't even own the name and now it's the 9th most valuable company on earth. By the same token, if I start a company, you join the very next day, I don't do anything and you do all the work and provide all the money, you are not a founder.

If that's your definition then technically he's not a founder.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

#60

Post by ethbr1 »

herbturbo wrote: post #30
afavour wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile. Buying Instagram was the Hail Mary. and yes, it paid off. But a tech company with the resources of Facebook could have been where Google is today with Android if they’d acted at…

Yes FB was all about HTML 5 and didn’t adopt native mobile until around 2012.

For fair context, it was only ~2007 when Apple (Jobs) pivoted from pushing web apps to native apps.
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