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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

#261

Post by butlike »

ojr wrote: post #95
nijave wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Wish it was more how you think than requiring boolean correct/incorrect answer on the whiteboard after 15min.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#262

Post by JKCalhoun »

breitling wrote: post #45
steve1977 wrote: post #42

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.

To be fair, buying Instagram so early + WhatsApp were great moves too.

Typically when a company is flush with cash, acquisitions become an obvious place to put that money.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#264

Post by evilduck »

mrits wrote: post #221
alsetmusic wrote: post #191

It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted. A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth an…

I think we will see the opposite. If we made no progress with LLMs we'd still have huge advancements and growth opportunities enhancing the workflows and tuning them to domain specific tasks.

I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.

Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#265

Post by adastra22 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #255
JKCalhoun wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You will have no genitals, and you will like it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#266

Post by butlike »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #250
butlike wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually how you create a death spiral for your company. You have to assume 'growth' and not 'death'. 'life' over 'lost'. 'flourishing' over 'withering'. That you're strong enough to survive.

Apple has seemingly done well waiting until they see a clear consumer direction (and woefully underserved tech there).

That's not playing into a bubble, that's creating a product for a market. You could also argue the Apple Vision is a misplay, or at least premature.

They've also arrogantly gone against consumer direction time and time again (PowerPC, Lightning Ports, no headphone jack, no replaceable battery, etc.)

And finally, sometimes their vision simply doesn't shake out (AirPower)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#267

Post by estearum »

vovavili wrote: post #253
jocaal wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others.

There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#268

Post by cma »

stogot wrote: post #111
cma wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> promoting

Where?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#269

Post by PhantomHour »

torginus wrote: post #228
alsetmusic wrote: post #191

It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted. A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth an…

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).

The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.

A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.

A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.

A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".

Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.

The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#270

Post by JKCalhoun »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #142
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.

The damage is already done though. If I worked for Meta and did not get millions, I think I would be pretty irate.
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