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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#71
post #39
post #2

Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?

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 pl…

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?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#73
post #54
post #24

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.

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

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#74

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#75
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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#76
post #51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unde…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#77

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#79
post #39
post #2

Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?

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 pl…

> 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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

laughs in metaverse
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