Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears • Hacker News Board

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#141

Post by Andrex » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

fartfeatures wrote: post #103

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#142

Post by iLoveOncall » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

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?

I'm still waiting for a single proof that there was any contract in the hundreds of millions that was signed.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#143

Post by konart » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

steve1977 wrote: post #42

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?

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.

>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?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#144

Post by smugma » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

stogot wrote: post #102

UncleMeat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#145

Post by Andrex » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

randycupertino wrote: post #138

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#146

Post by mlinhares » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

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?

Why are you assuming the investors are competent?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#147

Post by code_for_monkey » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

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...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#148

Post by ojr » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:18 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #127

ojr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 he…

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!

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#149

Post by Andrex » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:18 PM UTC

ozgung wrote: post #132

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#150

Post by Esophagus4 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:19 PM UTC

rs186 wrote: post #133

Esophagus4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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”