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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

#251
post #96
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most amusing has to be then Zuckerburg publishes his "thoughts" about how he's betting 100% on AI... written underneath the logo "Meta".

Zuck’s metaverse will be populated by AI characters running in the $65b manhattan data center The MAU metric must continue to go up, and no one will know if it’s human or NPC

The people "gooning" over Grok's Ani apparently can't wait to take their girlfriends there. ;-)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#252

clickbait. read the article. they just spent several billion hiring a leadership team. They are doing an all hands to figure out what they need to do.

yes, because meta has no incentive to act like there's no bubble

So it's not clickbait, even though the headline does not reflect the contents of the article, because you believe the headline is plausible?

I think AI is a bubble, but there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble. Sounds like they are spending even more money per researcher.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#253
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).

Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.

Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#254
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.

Its a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.

So wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#255
post #176

That's a man with conviction

Sorry, I was in the metaverse just now. I took my headset off though — could you please repeat that?

Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#256
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. They've developed and open sourced incredibly useful and cool tech 2. They have some really smart people working there 3. They're well run from a business/financial perspective, especially considering their lack of a hardware platform 4. They've survived multiple paradigm shifts, and generally picked the right bets Among other things.

all of those are basically true for every big tech company

So we agree that Meta is at minimum the equal of every big tech company?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.

So wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?

Wage suppression? Its the opposite were talking about here. Pay large amounts of money to make sure people don't work on challenging problems.

But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#258

What I don't get is that they are gunning for the people that brought us the innovations we are working with right now. How often does it happen that someone really strikes gold a second time in research at such a high level? It's not a sport.

How about Ilya

Reworded from [1]: Earlier this year Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence. Sutskever rebuffed Meta’s efforts, as well as the company’s attempt to hire him

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-super...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#259

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…

No one else is adding the context of where things were at the time in tech...

> 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 flattened growth of their flagship application.

Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.

Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#260

>> 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)

Very few will not want to wear the glasses.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)

Last night I had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, it left me wondering if the main draw of "AI" is better thought of as entertainment. And whether using it for even just rough discovery actually serves as a black hole for the motivation to get things done.

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