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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

#111

Post by stogot »

cma wrote: post #90
kkoncevicius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#112

Post by aleph_minus_one »

apwell23 wrote: post #110
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #88

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. 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 skill…

it wasn't sheryl

Who was it then?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#113

Post by apwell23 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #31
roxolotl wrote: 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?

> 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.

how tf do you know when you are "finished"

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#114

Post by ojr »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #38
ojr wrote: 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.

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

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#115

Post by _heimdall »

marcyb5st wrote: post #74
mgaunard wrote: post #12

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 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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#116

Post by prasadjoglekar »

apwell23 wrote: post #107
prasadjoglekar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#117

Post by earthnail »

lelanthran wrote: post #52
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#120

Post by andrepd »

roxolotl wrote: 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?

Yes, people who struck it rich are not miraculously more intelligent or capable. Seems obvious, but many people believe they are.
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