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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

131–140 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#131
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?

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.

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...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#132
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?

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'v…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#133
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#134
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?

Because you want the ability to low-ball prospective candidates sooner rather than later.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

laughs in metaverse

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#136

>> 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?

“ 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)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#137

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.

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 fla…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#138
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?

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'v…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#139
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?

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.

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> 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.

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